Dance Performance at the Rialto Fish Market
Sunday 28 July 2019
Choreography: Alessio Trevisani
Freies Tanz Ensemble Berlin: Mithun Raj Gill, Jonathan Kolski, Maria Ladopoulos, Matteo Magnabosco, Claire Wolff.
Contemporary dance performance "The Body of Salt", conceived exclusively by the Freies Tanz Ensemble of Berlin for the Skrei Convention Project, as part of the Creative Europe EU program.
Skrei Convention is an initiative that sees three countries – Italy, Norway and Portugal – engaged in the development of an online platform thanks to which, starting from the ancient trade routes of cod / stockfish / baccalà that for centuries joined the North Sea to the main ports of southern Europe: a digital archive will be made available which focuses on safeguarding and enhancing the tradition of fishing, processing and consumption of cod, stockfish and baccalà. Parallel to the web platform (www.skrei.net) an international program of artists in residence has proposed between 2019 and 2020, which began in Venice, inside the historic Rialto Fish Market with the performance "The Body of Salt" .
Water, salt, the body (considered as animal, human and divine) and the air (contained in a huge balloon) are the 4 elements on which the performance structure has built. On the one hand, these elements refer to their ability to change the state and form of the material of a living being if deprived of its natural habitat, on the other symbolically open the space for a ritual based on the alchemical solution between salt and water, between ancestral purification and scarification of the body. Every journey by sea aspires to pursue freedom, knowledge and perhaps virtue since the time of Ulysses, whose skin was covered with salt just as today is that of a humanity in constant motion on the sea. Also the choice of the location was not accidental, as the Rialto Fish Market was located below what was once the home of Pietro Querini, the Venetian merchant and navigator thanks to which the Serenissima Republic in 1432 discovered the stockfish and to which the development project for a new Cultural Route of the Council of Europe: the Via Querinissima.
The performance, organized by the CERS Italy and the Mo.CA. – Modern Contemporary Art with the collaboration of Wavents Events & Services, Vela spa and Veritas spa was included in the review "Le Città in festa" of the Municipality of Venice.
