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Salvo Lombardo

Performer, choreographer, multimedia artist and curator of performance projects, over the years Salvo Lombardo has carried out cross-media research, integrating dance, theatre and visual arts in his art. Many of his works and research projects have resulted from his collaboration with numerous festivals, theatres, museums and independent spaces in Italy and abroad.

Between 2012 and 2015 he is co-director and director of Clinica Mammut. Since 2016 he has been the artistic director of Compagnia Chiasma. Since 2020 he is among the founding members of Ostudio in Rome. From 2021 he is artistic director of Interazioni - Festival (Rome).

In 2021-2022 he is selected for the European project MMDD_Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance. The same year he joins the European network BeSpectActive! for which he realises the community work Punctum. In 2022 he is among the artists of the project May Town in Zetkin Park at the Schaubühne Lindenfels Leipzig (DE).

In 2023 he collaborates on the research project Laboratorio Excelsior of the Department of Humanistic Studies of the University of Turin.

In 1881 the Gran Ballo Excelsior, one of the most successful Italian dances of the nineteenth century, made its debut at La Scala in Milan. As its author Luigi Manzotti declared, it celebrated the greatness of civilisation against the obscurantism that forced people "into the darkness of servitude and ignominy". These were the years of the Universal Expositions where the achievements of progress, the industrial revolution, colonial imperialism and the affirmation of the concept of national identity and its imagery were celebrated. Given these premises, Salvo Lombardo, leader of the Chiasma company, asks what is the cultural heritage of the idea of the West from the end of the 19th century today. Which iconographies and imagery of the Gran Ballo Excelsior re-emerge today, in apparently different forms, in the representations of the "others", in the design of bodies, and in the negotiation of relations between Europe and the "rest of the world"? The play created by Lombardo is not intended to be a rearrangement of the ballet, but rather a re-mediation of it that focuses on the stereotypical imagery that the present proposes through its languages, its representations and its media.

This Excelsior of ours is therefore not a re-enactment; rather, it is a scenic device of re-emergencies that, in relation to its "utopian" matrix, proceeds in a "dystopian" and non-ordered manner, as you point out. Although it refers to an object of the past, it does not take pleasure in that feeling of "retromania" that is rampant today among the nostalgia of old exercises of power and "new" returns to order.

- Salvo Lombardo

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