Mixed Doubles

Co-funded by the European Union's Creative Europe programme, the four-year-long project Europe Beyond Access (2018-2021) supports artists with disabilities in breaking out of their isolation, broadening horizons and promoting their creative development by presenting innovative performing art works to European audiences.

Oriente Occidente is one of the sponsors of the project and, in collaboration with the Fondazione Nazionale della Danza/Aterballetto, of Feeling Good by Diego Tortelli, a choreographer associated with the FND; a poetic duet on the ability to “be” and to “feel”. Tortelli takes his inspiration for his compositions from aesthetic references and spatial geometries and, in this specific case, from Leonardo's Vitruvian Man as well, to reflect on the concepts of “squaring”, return to order, perfection, sliding into the necessity of the circle as a symbol of perpetual motion and acceptance. It is no coincidence that the circle has also been chosen by the United Nations as its Accessibility Logo. Tortelli defeats canonical beauty to achieve the sublime through the flow of movement and the frailness of non-symmetry.

But Feeling Good is not the only outcome of the EBA project presented at the 2021 Festival. On the same evening, three other duets created by other partners will be on show. Cornered, by the young choreographer Faizah Grootens, is produced by the Holland Dance Festival outlining, through intense physical work, the balance between empathy and struggle achieved by two bodies trying not to betray themselves in the search for a necessary mutual understanding. Re-call, by choreographer Venetsiana Kalampaliki, produced by the Athens-based Onassis Stegi, which focuses on how the body changes in relation to time, through two portraits of women caught in the simplicity of the traces left behind by their stories. Two women are also the protagonists of the latest duet performance designed by choreographer Roser López Espinosa for the Swedish company Skånes Dansteater, in which two delicate yet powerful figures meet, allowing the boundaries of relationships to emerge as they do so: what brings us closer and what separates us? A refined poetics combined with physical prowess against the backdrop of a lively, playful and sometimes ironic universe.