This meeting and exchange stage with the Indian partner Ahum Trust took place in Bangalore from November 23-24, 2021 and laid the foundation for the co-creation process of the show Dante Beyond Borders, with the co-productive involvement of the Italian Cultural Institutes of Mumbai and New Delhi.
Director Anna Dora Dorno and performer Nicola Pianzola had the opportunity to engage in presence with Indian classical dancer Anuradha Venkataraman and video maker Ashwin Iyer with whom they had previously collaborated remotely for the creation of the web series VideoDante # India together with composer Riccardo Nanni.
From these two days of hands-on work and exchange of knowledge and techniques, which took place in the spaces of Swastika School of Dance, the artists decided to work on the staging of the previously created web series, creating the dance theater performance entitled Dante Beyond Borders, which premiered live streamed at the Tata Literature Festival in Mumbai on November 21, 2021 from the Jagriti Theatre in Bangalore, surpassing 20. 000 views, and debuted with an initial studio run at the Rangashankara Theatre in Bangalore on Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, 2021, then coming to Italy at the PerformAzioni Festival XI edition and debuting on Sept. 17, 2022 at the Laura Betti Theatre in Casalecchio di Reno after an additional production residency.
Co-creation Stage, Ahum Trust – Bangalore
The exploration of the boundaries between the arts, understood as walls that demarcate genres and styles but at the same time set us free to contaminate and overcome them in search of new ways in art, the confrontation between centuries-old performance traditions and new languages of the contemporary, but also the investigation of the boundary between the earthly and the spiritual, have guided the artists in the creative process around suggestions and cross-references between Dante’s work and the Indian classical epic, weaving into a physical, visual and textual dramaturgy, tercets from The Divine Comedy with passages from the Mahabharata, precisely on the occasion of the celebration of the 700th anniversary of the death of the Supreme Poet.