28 - 29 - 30 -31 August 2022 Villa il Palmerino - Spazio Gada Firenze
In the thick, crisp air of late summer, as a part of the Estate Fiorentina (Florentine Summer) program, il Palmerino realized the project In the Name of Vernon Lee, in which the association hosted a series of events, ballets, film screenings, workshops and round table discussions related to the text The Ballet of the Nations (1915) by English writer Vernon Lee. On the evening of August 28th, the festival opened with a viewing of the Impertinence Company’s 2019 film adaptation of the text Ballet of the Nations, written and directed by Roseanna Anderson and Joshua Ben-Tovim, which was an experimental work that nearly approaches video art.
The authors and interpreters of the film facilitated the evening, engaging in dialogue with the theatrical production of the same text, concurrently staged at il Palmerino in 2019, which was directed by Angeliki Papoulia with Alesso Montagnani and Elisa Barucchieri.
The next morning, a group of guests coming from diverse disciples, ethnic backgrounds, and cultures, reconstructed Vernon Lee's mixture of archaic influences, tracing its history from early performance readings to contemporary rewrites such as that of Impermanence.
In the afternoon, the GADA playground space, suggestive of a deconsecrated church, held a dance contemporary workshop under the direction of the Impermanence Company. Free movement exercises and body language culminated in the performance of a dance, the result of the creativity of the workshop participants themselves, who, directed by the teachers, improvised themselves as choreographers by reinterpreting the original images from the Ballet of The Nations text.
On the evening of July 30, four improvised solos about human passions were staged on il Palmerino’s amphitheater stage. Impermanence started from a reworking of the characters of Panic and Suspicion from The Ballet of the Nations to build an intense choreography regimented on the dialectic between attraction and rejection, conflict and seduction. Punctuated by the remarks of Alessio Montagnani's evocative performance as Satan, two dancers chased and repelled each other on the stage and then on the villa's vast lawn overlooking the view of Fiesole.
For a grand festival finale, Silvia Giordano, a young Italian choreographer, investigated Vernon Lee's aesthetic and psychological thinking in relation to the concepts of time, presence, and absence.
For the festival’s grand finale, on August 31st, the young Italian choreographer Silvia Giordano explored Vernon Lee’s aesthetic and psychological thinking in relation to the concepts of time, presence, and absence. Video and text guided the audience on an interactive journey among the olive trees, dotted with scenic objects that served as traces of the writer, converging in Ginevra Mazzoni's moving performance, which brought the audience to a living present.
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