The undergrowth is an important part of the forest ecosystem. Shrubs, mosses, blueberries, nettles, mushrooms and other life forms grow in the shade of trees, adapting to particular conditions of light and humidity. The undergrowth provides food, shelter and nesting areas for wild animals, gives shelter and protection to insects, small mammals and birds. But what’s “under” the undergrowth? In that vital penumbra made of teeming matter and desire?
Sotto il sotto del bosco grew from the observation of this world, as a workshop led by performer and choreographer Chiara Bersani, and aimed at people with motor disabilities of different ages, and as the basis for her new performance Sottobosco. In the conceptual phase, the artist started from a narrative cue that sees a group of children with disabilities get lost in a wood. And that’s where it became vitally important for Bersani to meet groups of people with disabilities in the space of the scene. And in doing so, she decided to create moments to share physical and emotional experience, through movement and sound, giving life to an ecosystem made up of dances, the pushes of desire, all alongside cascades of cordiality and intertwined forms of games; to experience an horizontal alliance between bodies.
Each day includes 3 hours of sharing, during which the team – made up of Chiara Bersani, sound artist Lemmo, dancer and choreographer Elena Sgarbossa and assistant Simone Chiacchiararelli – shares research, reflections and practices of the body in which participants are invited to use their own aspirations in order to conquer their own space.
Sotto il sotto del bosco lasts three days and will share practices with the Short Theatre 2023 audience on Thursday the 7th of September.
Chiara Bersani is an Italian performer and author active in the performing arts. Both as an interpreter and as a director/choreographer she moves through different languages and visions. Her works, presented across international circuits, are born as creative dialogues with different natural spaces and are mainly aimed at an audience physically “close” to the stage. Her research as an interpreter and author is based on the concept of the Political Body and on the creation of practices aimed at training its presence and action. Her “manifesto” work is Gentle Unicorn, a performance included in the Aerowaves circuit. For the rigor in embodying this study she was awarded the UBU Award as Best New Actress/Performer under 35 in 2018. In August 2019, during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Gentle Unicorn and Chiara Bersani won first prize in the dance category of the Total Theatre Awards. Chiara Bersani is an artist supported by the apap circuit (advancing performing arts project-Feminist Future), a project co-financed by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union, until 2024.
Ilaria Lemmo is a composer and sound artist in the field of electronic and experimental music, who graduated in Electronic Music from the Claudio Abbado Civic School in Milan. Her work explores the possibilities of algorithmic composition in relation and dialogue with acoustic space and as a listening practice, both with a multidisciplinary approach and in the context of sound research. She investigates the electronic medium as a tool for observation and interpenetration – which is both a computer language for the synthesis of sound and the processing of complex data structures, as well as a way of dealing with field recording and the processing of recorded sounds. She teaches electronic music and also works as a sound designer for the performing and visual arts (collaborating with amongst others Chiara Bersani, Teatro Valdoca, Margherita Morgantin, saudadesaudade).
Elena Sgarbossa is an Italian artist active in the field of contemporary dance and performance. She graduated from the three-year Professional Course in Contemporary Dance of the Rome Ballet directed by Roberto Casarotto. Her artistic career intertwines authorial processes and choreographic experimentation in a fluid way, together with research and movement-based projects for communities. Among the most relevant to her practice are the Dance Well – Research and Movement for Parkinson project and the EU Empowering Dance projects. In 2019 she embraced choreography by creating KEO, the winning performance of DNAppunti Coreografici. Her creation double: double was selected by the Showcase of young signature dance – Network Anticorpi XL 2022. She is co-founder of the Cultural Association Base 9, an artistic team that explores processes of co-imagination and co-creation linked to movement, allowing collective and individual poetics to blend and feed one other.
sustained by Fondazione Alta Mane Italia
partnership with Carrozzerie | n.o.t
in the frame of the project Insieme Siamo Arte 2023 realised by Città Metropolitana di Roma Capitale and ATCL
realised with funds from Otto per Mille della Chiesa Valdese
ph Pietro Bertora / Santarcangelo festival 2023
The workshop is part of RECIPROCITY. The activity is free and aimed at girls/boys and adults with motor disabilities aged eighteen and older. To book, write to shorttheatrefestival@gmail.com, indicating your name and surname, telephone number and a few words to tell us what motivations and desires drive you to participate.
