salvo lombardo
EXCELSIOR ©Carolina Farina
GENERAL INFO
https://www.salvolombardo.org/ & www.chiasma.eu
GENERAL KEYWORDS: Archive, Club culture, Community art, Creative writing, Public space, Street dance, Relational art, Re-mediation of repertory, Theatre, Visual arts
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CHOREOGRAPHIC WORKS: AMOЯ, AMOR, Casual Bystanders, Excelsior (Manzotti, Luigi) Excelsior (Lombardo, Salvo), Sport (Manzotti, Luigi), Sport (work-in-progress)
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​PEOPLE: Castellucci, Claudia (Societas Raffaello Sanzio); Manzotti, Luigi
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PLACES: Rome, Sardinia, Villarosa (Sicily,Italy)
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CITATION: ​Interview with Salvo Lombardo, Susanne Franco, online, Date (24/01/2023). Project “Mnemedance”, Collection Mnemedance (#Mnemedance20) URL:<https://www.mnemedance.com/salvo-lombardo>, (accessed dd/mm/yyyy).
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INTERVIEWS MAY ONLY BE REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION BY MNEMEDANCE
ABOUT
SALVO LOMBARDO is an Italian artist established in the field of dance as a choreographer by taking a path that may be considered unconventional when compared to the dance canon and the traditional way of becoming a professional in the field. Instead of in-depth training for mastering a dance technique or a style, he opted for a horizontal way of learning that could offer him versatile and stratified education in the form of artistic “affiliations”, meaning here explorations and experiences, that could nurture his curiosity on a research subject and at a compositional level. In his work for the stage, a sort of mosaic of memories, archives of gestures, cultural objects, and imaginaries, the body is a point of departure and arrival for deconstructing the traces of the past and building a new “reality” mutated by the present. Aiming to de-canonise the representation of the bodies, he fearlessly immerses himself in the world of archives and evoking the philosopher Michel De Certeau, he considers the archive as a “practiced place” mediated through the body.
AMOR ©Carolina Farina
INTERVIEW
QUESTIONS
[00:00:19]
Which are the first memories that you associate with dance?
[00:05:38]
When did you begin to define yourself as a dancer and choreographer?
[00:08:08]
Where do you currently position your work?
[00:10:58]
Which experiences do you recognise as fundamental regarding your versatile and stratified training?
[00:14:02]
What body knowledge do you consider your artistic heritage and how do you activate it?
[00:17:26]
What do you think you have forgotten about your training and what would you like to be able to forget?
[00:20:02]
What strategies do you use in your work to activate your body memory?
[00:23:27]
How does your work interrogate but also integrate the history of dance?
[00:28:37]
In what way do you think your work contributes to questioning the past?
[00:33:12]
Have you organised an archive of your works or systematised an archiving process?
[00:36:52]
In your research, do you consider participation and community-making as transmission strategies?
[00:41:05]
What do you think of the notion of “repertoire” in relation to the body, the archive and the choreographic process?
[00:44:35]
How do you approach the notion of canon in dance and in particular in relation to your trilogy?
[00:54:12]
How do you think today's dance registers the new historical and political awareness of cultural and identity issues and of power dynamics?
CASUAL BYSTANDERS ©Paolo Porto
BIOS
SALVO LOMBARDO is a performer, choreographer, multimedia artist and performing arts curator. Since 2016, he has been the artistic director of Chiasma. Over the years he has deepened his research moving between dance, theatre and visual arts. He is currently an associate artist of the MilanOltre Festival and the Lavanderia a Vapore in Collegno. He collaborated assiduously with Fabbrica Europa until 2020. In 2017-2018 he was an associate artist of the Oriente Occidente Festival and from 2019 to 2021 he was co-curator of Resurface Festival (Rome). Since 2020, he is among the founding members of Ostudio (an associated artists' studio and independent cross-disciplinary research space in Rome). Since 2021, he has been the artistic director of Interazioni - Festival (Rome). His artistic works are generally hosted and produced by several festivals, theatres, museums and independent spaces in Italy and abroad including Théâtre National de Chaillot de Paris (FR), Attakkalari Dance Company in Bangalore (India), Triennale Milano, Aura Dance Theatre in Kaunas (LIT), Romaeuropa Festival, Teatro di Roma, Teatro nazionale della Toscana, Aterballetto / Centro coreografico nazionale, Scenario pubblico / Centro nazionale di produzione della Danza, MART - Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Festival Short Theatre, Festival Attraversamenti Multipli, Schaubühne Lindenfels Leipzig (DE), Kilowatt Festival and Teatri di Vetro and several other institutions.
SUSANNE FRANCO is Associate Professor in Dance, Theatre and Performance Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and curator of dance events and programs for different institutions. She is the author of Martha Graham (2003), Frédéric Flamand (2004), and she edited the special issue Ausdruckstanz: il corpo, la danza e la critica (Biblioteca Teatrale, 2006). She also co-edited Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research (2007); Ricordanze. Memoria in movimento e coreografie della storia (2010) and The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Memory (forthcoming) with Marina Nordera; Moving Spaces. Enacting Dance, Performance, and the Digital in the Museum with Gabriella Giannachi, and On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools (2022) with Cristina Baldacci. She was the coordinator for Ca’ Foscari’s contribution to Dancing Museums-The Democracy of Beings (2018–2021), and she is currently the PI of the international research project Memory in Motion: Re-Membering Dance History (Mnemedance; SPIN2 Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, 2019–2023).