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Irene Russolillo

Irene Russolillo, This is your skin | ph Sarah Melchiori
Irene Russolillo, This is your skin | ph Sarah Melchiori
Irene Russolillo, Dentro Toccare | ph Sarah Melchiori

Irene Russolillo has been creating and performing her works since 2013. In her performances she integrates movement, singing and writing, creating works with a very strong emotional component and music has a great presence.

The first works she creates are the solos Ebollizione, Strascichi and A loan. In 2016 she creates a fourth solo The speech in collaboration with Lisi Estaras of Ballets C de la B. In 2018 she creates her first work for a trio of dancers This is your skin, a choreographic concert that debuts and is produced by Festival Oriente Occidente. In 2019, she signs the choreography of Mirrors, a group work created as part of the Italy, Culture, Africa programme of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

As a choreographer, she has received support from the Network of indipedent auteur dance Anticorpi XL, from ALDES, an association of artists based in Lucca, from Garage29 in Brussels.

She was an associate artist of the Oriente Occidente Festival for the biennium 2017-2018.

In This is your skin the choreographic composition dialogues with songs performed live. The movements and the textes, linked in a genetic relationship, take shape together with three bodies that are continuously moving towards each other, in a never-ending approach.

Like a cartoon disturbed by flashes of reality, This is your skin communicates through excesses, exclamations - gestures situated on the margins of articulated speech - without actually forming a true discourse. Coming from an emotional and therefore rhythmic idea of choreographying, it wants to get indeed to a space-time created purely through music and energy, trying to talk direct to hearts.

This is your skin is not a facile work, here the physical composition of the three interpreters is also defined in relation to a broad sound score greatly contemplative... an extraordinary vocal composition parallel to the one of the body, this design is emotional despite the strongly conceptual constitution of the work ... These bodies are not called to service a beautiful aesthetic form, a pleasant surface. Instead it would seem that the concern of Russolillo leads to a complex choreography, affected by a thinking and rigorously performed.

- Paolo Ruffini - Hystrio

A WAVE that, by its nature, approaches and moves away from those who look at it. Wave is a choreographic concert thought to be enjoyed by the scene, sharing the space with the performers.

Viewers are immersed into the performance instead of being placed in front of it, free to move through the space, in order to choose their favourite perspectives; a performance that allows the shift from a direct and intimate experience to a distant field of vision. Are we familiar with our environments? How do we access other spaces/Others' spaces?

The physical and vocal composition in this work comes from three colorful bodies that follow fanciful imaginations to draw themselves into the space; the lyrics, sung live, originate from these fantasies. In this framework, an always-changing vital tension is produced. How do we disclose ourselves beyond our bodies? Do we ever consider ourselves as fully-defined, "concluded"?

Wave, as a dynamic portrait of a complex microuniverse, wants to reflect on disorientation and new ways of inhabiting always-changing real and inner spaces. The rejection of solitude, the perennial gaze from and on the Other, sometimes uncomfortable and yet necessary and the praise to one's own sometimes weird nature are the themes that make the various elements coexist.

By means of emotional and energetic parcours, Wave looks for new spaces for the artistic practice too, as music and dance are able to talk direct to hearts.

Irene Russolillo's Wave project has found its final form and made its debut on 2 September 2018 as part of the Oriente Occidente Festival under the title This is your skin.

The origin of my works has always been autobiographical and linked to feelings and thoughts regarding human relationships. I chose an eclectic aesthetics, in which the creation is always the result of joints and overlaps between purely danced matter, vocal work linked to the use of words and singing, original writing and editing of existing texts, seeing choreography as a putting together worlds that are complementary and that amplify one another, trying to build up energetical and emotional paths, where music is very important. In this new project, I involved other performers for the first time in order to propose them the issues - themes and language - that I has been working on in the last four years. About how to begin, I started thinking to dialogue, coexistence and utopias that regard relations with Others, shifting from a large geopolitical scale drifting to the more intimate scale of individuals' reciprocal relations. I often question myself about cultural dialogue and coexistence, even when forced, as the only possible form of democracy. And I think of the basic concept of giving up something in order to get something new and generate an amplified feedback.

Focusing on my desires regarding the new project and also as a reaction to a personal feeling of artistic isolation, I found myself identifying a few keywords: invitation, care, sensuality, mutuality, dedication, feelings, gut.

- Irene Russolillo

irenerussolillo.com