June 19-24, 2007
International scene of improvisation live performing arts
eighth edition
International project of Art and Culture on the Poetics of Performance and Improvisation Dance.
In celebrating the summer solstice, Zipfest opens the doors of its eighth edition to supporters and fans of the festival in the week of June 19th to 24th, with an international kermis of dance, music, improvisation, and an original program with various innovations.
In seven editions Zip has been able to enhance its festival experience, meeting any number of artists, public and dancers from all over the world and gradually transforming the project concept and the artistic proposal in the course of the various editions, also in terms of improving the organization and reception, bearing out its role as a unique appointment in this field in Italy, on a par with analogous international events.
It is with renewed pride and artistic commitment that we inaugurate the eighth edition with a calendar packed with events and special guests.
Dance
K.J. Holmes
Patricia Kuypers
Charlie Morrissey
Oleg Soulimenko
Rossella Fiumi
Bettina Helmrich
Jacky Miredin
Laura Moro
Adrian Russi
Ruby Worth
Manuela Bondavalli
Barbara Lucarini
Music
Officina Zoè
Keith Biesack
Contents of the festival
A lively kermis of artists from various countries, have been invited to collaborate in the creative production of events, promoting the cooperation and identification of a transcultural art.
Zip raises the question of the processes of artistic interaction, creates the contact and occasion for cooperation among the guest artists who bare their experiences, affinities and cultural and generational differences to create the festival, together, in Orvieto.
Leitmotif of the Festival is the staging of the Improvisation Performance of dance and live music, mediated by the practice and aesthetics of Contact Improvisation.
This type of dance was founded by the artist Steve Paxton in the United States in the early nineteen seventies, an investigation into the expressive possibilities of the body outside the codified and predefined schemes of the classic approach to movement.
Born in 2000
The festival is held every year in the splendid Etruscan city of Orvieto, transforming the old palazzos into a citadel of the art of improvisation, with a rich program of events, live.
The project is the brainchild of the choreographer Rossella Fiumi, an independent Roman artist with her artistic residence in Orvieto, in Caravajal15 residenza dinamica, and it is supported by the City of Orvieto.
Editions 2004, 2005 and 2006
Among the special guests, Simone Forti, Daniel Lepkoff, Andrew Harwood, Ray Chung in dance, and Stefano Bollani, Antonello Salis, Gabriele Mirabassi, Pierre Favre, Michel Godard in music. The festival has grown in visibility, attracting hundreds of dancers from throughout the world, enthusiasts in the field and an international audience.
The festival 2007 confirms a cast of international fame
Twenty guest artists, from various parts of the world, will animate the city from early morning to late at night, in a rich calendar of concerts, jams, performances intensive workshops, encounters and laboratories on Contact Improvisation, Improvisation dance and the performing arts.
Performances and workshops in Palazzo dei Sette
The Guests and participants in the festival
The dance-music interactions are unique creations proposed then and there by the artists, in a form of spectacle called Real Time Composition.
Among the most eagerly awaited events of the festival, the improvisation performances, instantaneous compositions by the guest artists, are also produced in the intensive workshops and laboratories, addressed to the active participants in the festival.
Guest performers and masters of the festival: K.J. Holmes (USA), Oleg Soulimenko (Austria\Russia), Charlie Morrissey (United Kingdom), Patricia Kuypers (Belgium), Rossella Fiumi (Italy), Keith Biesack (USA), Jacky Miredin (France), Adrian Russi (Switzerland), Bettina Helmrich (Germany), Laura Moro (Italy), Ruby Worth (Scotland). Two more laboratories, are proposed by the Italian teachers Manuela Bondavalli and Barbara Lucarini.
The afternoon of Saturday June 22nd, the 2007 project also plans for a special appointment addressed to all the participants registered in the festival, who are invited to present an original performance, as part of the program. We therefore informally request the participants who register for the festival to spontaneously propose their creations for June twenty-second. It is an interesting occasion offered to those who wish to share and highlight their own new performances for an international public.
An unusual program with regards to the traditional canons of live performances, the improvisation performances are an original appointment for an audience that loves to watch the genesis of the events, live.
Zipfest07 innovation: traditions and contemporary contaminations
Comparing cultures
Officina Zoè, the original music group of Salento, is the welcome guest of the festival on stage in Piazza del Popolo the evening of June 23rd, with a great closing concert: a mix of the warmth, sounds and colors of southern Italy, passion “in motion” to celebrate the summer solstice.
During the concert, the guest performers and participants in the festival will meet and animate the piazza, dancing together with the public in the “rounds” of the traditional Pizzica-Pizzica of the folk of Salento and Contact Jam, practiced by dancers of this genre, in an enthralling folk festival of dance and movement.
Crossroads of social encounter, the piazza will be transformed into the privileged premises for a unique “laboratory”, its debut for a contamination of these two dance genres.
“Round-Ronda”, is an alternative proposal in the usual festival program, exploring the differences and alchemies of the couple dance, in the archaic and riveting world of the traditional Pizzica-Pizzica dance and the more recent abstract and physical language of the Contact Improvisation dance, through the exchange and practice of the two kinds of round dances: the typical “Ronda” of the Pizzica and the “Round Robin” of Contact Improvisation.
It is a feather in the hat of the 2007 edition, favoring the encounter, exchange and cooperation, evaluating of the differences, and the investigation of cultures and traditions that seem to be far apart, offering new stimuli in the communication process.
An event that identifies opposites and then mediates them.
Reflections on Pizzica and Contact
Let’s take into consideration the differences and similarities of these two types of dance, both couple dances.
This small compendium is a sort of investigation as to just how these two languages can meet and exchange signs, expressions, learn from each other…
Emotion
The Pizzica, an age-old folk dance, sprang from the suffering and stories of daily life of the people of the south. It is pervaded by passion, provocation and revival of courting in the couple, a narrative context in which the contact between the two dancers is based above all on emotion. It is mute language where the physical contact never becomes real, and the less the physical contact is present, all the more the emotional and passionate dialogue emerges.
During the dance the Pizzica keeps the two dancers apart from each other, and joins them at its conclusion.
A type of dance, that first separates and then unites.
Contact: a much more recent form of dance, when compared to the Pizzica, based on the principles of physics and the improvised physical contact, between the two dancers.
It is a vital form of social dance, with the potentialities of developing a powerful sense of community between those who practice it.
It is an abstract context, in which the emotions are not part of the vocabulary of the encounter. The more emotion is banned from the encounter, the more the pure and unforeseen physical contact comes to the fore.
Those who practice Contact reflect together on the physical laws in relation to the mass of the body: gravity, weight, momentum, inertia, friction and awareness of space. They are not interested in obtaining a result, but rather want to explore the changes in the state of the body, with appropriate postures and energies.
The source of the dialogue in this dance is to be found in the absence of emotion and its representation.
Contact retains the physical contact between the two dancers throughout the dance, and then tends to separate the couple at the end of the dance.
A form of dance, that first unites and then separates.
Healing and therapy
The meeting of opposites, that move to the same points: the healing in the Pizzica, the therapy of Contact, and enjoyment for both.
The origins of the Pizzica are of a healing dance, of old medieval origins, as exorcism for the tarantate, the women bitten by the tarantola spider.
In the therapeutic rite, music is the most important element. When a girl was thought to have been bitten by the tarantola, musicians were taken to her home, who began to play a frenetic rhythm on their tambourines, violins, harmonicas and other instruments so that the girl would dance, sing and sweat until she was exhausted.
Contact is a form of dance that helps one to enter in contact with oneself and with the other: persons with a professional or personal interest in the search for a tuning of their bodies, - dancers, doctors and movement therapists, actors, musicians, young people and old, healthy and disabled, and schools of thought connected to psychotherapy - believe this kind of dance is a way of exploring its meaning.
This is why Contact Improvisation can also be a form of dance therapy.
Music
In the Pizzica, music is the leading element, fundamental and captivating, for the movement of the dance and for the dance itself: the Pizzica following the music of the tambourines beating to help the tarantata heal.
In Contact, on the other hand, music is banned, it is a disturbing element, the dance springs from silence and a listening to oneself.
Music is a hindrance in listening to oneself and to the other.
Again in both cases the aims are the same: enjoyment, aesthetic sense, the power of energy and healing.
The people and the intellectuals
The Pizzica, originally an expression of the people, has become an object of study for intellectuals and anthropologists of folk traditions.
Contact, an intellectual dance created for a few elect, has become a form of social dance practiced throughout the world, but is always exclusive.
Caravajal 15 residenza dinamica
Via Malabranca 15 Orvieto (TR) Italy
tel +39 0763 341479
fax +39 0763 340669
info@contactfestival.it
www.contactfestival.it