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Paola Bianchi

Paola Bianchi with her back to the camera, sitting on the ground cross-legged and with her arms raised upward. She is wearing a gray jumpsuit. In the background a musician working with her.

Artistic residence Paola Bianchi | ph Giulia Lenzi

Paola Bianchi rehearsing in the Studio. Behind her the musician and composer who works with her.

Artistic residence Paola Bianchi | ph Giulia Lenzi

Musician Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo as he plays electric guitar. His concentrated face is framed by a long white beard; he wears a pink striped shirt and numerous rings. Tattoos can be glimpsed on his arms and neck.

Artistic residence Paola Bianchi | ph Giulia Lenzi

Paola Bianchi is on the floor, moving. Her legs are beginning a rotation and her face is covered by her light hair, facing the floor.

Artistic residence Paola Bianchi | ph Giulia Lenzi

Paola Bianchi, choreographer and dancer, has been active in national and international contemporary dance since the late 1980s. She collaborates with personalities from different worlds: from music to video art, from writing to theatre.

Her research focuses on the body in movement and its political value. She makes extensive use of different mediums, investigating the vision of choreography through other languages; among them, video, which has led her to participate in many festivals dedicated to screendance.

She conducts choreographic research workshops and holds theoretical lectures in several Italian universities. She has been the artistic director of exhibitions and festivals.

In 2020 she won the Rete critica 9 e ¾ Award with ELP project. In the same year Clemente Tafuri and David Beronio (Teatro Akropolis) produced La parte maledetta. Viaggio ai confini del teatro.Paola Bianchi, a film that presents the choreographer's artistic journey in the form of an interview.

OtherNess is the first stage of a new phase of ELP project and starts with the collection of a multicultural retinal-mnemonic archive.

Paola Bianchi, in residence in October 2020 at Oriente Occidente Studio, asked a group of people from foreign countries what public images were imprinted on their retinas that even after a long time continue to be alive in their visual memory. Images that have crossed seas and lands for miles and miles, crossed borders, places and nations, kept in the eyes, fixed in the memory of wandering human beings - what have they brought into their bodies?

OtherNess is the result of this investigation. The multicultural retinal archive that was created became the starting point for the embodiment of images that entered the dancer's body, deforming it, breaking it down, generating "body states".

OtherNess is part of the ELP project, which investigates the relationship between word and dance through the transmission of archives of postures.

Eliminating my body as a model means avoiding the ridiculous imitation of movement, but it does not mean excluding myself from the process of creation. It means accepting other bodies without trying to mould them in my own image and likeness, giving space to those bodies by accepting their diversity; it means encouraging the performer to perceive his own body as unique, to identify the points where the internal forces of the body rest, to feel the folds in which the movement, every movement, is born; it means helping the performer to fill the form with content, to destroy the form so that in every moment the body is present. It does not mean denying my authorship but the hierarchy of power.

- Paola Bianchi

paolabianchi.com