Have you been to Gorizia before?
If yes, something you haven’t forgotten:
Yes, I’ve been. I’ve never forgotten the Jewish cemetery and Carlo Michelstaedter’s tomb.

According to your personal experience:
Dance is… the mystical experience of living
Dance can… achieve ubiquity and the co-presence of past, present and future 
Dance will be… what it has always been, the mystical experience of living

The most difficult thing that dance made you experience:
To find out and admit to myself that I am not a great dancer

The most beautiful thing that dance made you discover:
The reality of things

A piece of advice to a budding company:
Being a newbie myself I wouldn’t know… maybe “beware of those who want to take advantage of you”

A wish for your audience:
A more united Europe, a more Afro-Asian United Europe

What inspired your show, in 3 words:
Europe, al-Khidr, Pasolini

Now tell me why I should come and see it:
“I need some advice/a Council for a United Europe”

Have you been to Gorizia before?
Not yet, but I am enticed by its geographical position and I would love to experience the Mitteleuropean atmosphere that, as I suppose, characterizes it.

According to your personal experience:
Dance is… an important life choice.
Dance can… change people and things. 
Dance will be… always in everything that moves.

The most difficult thing that dance made you experience:
Dance taught me to explore myself and the people I work with, not only in the body but also in the soul.

The most beautiful thing that dance made you discover:
The freedom and variety of movement.

A piece of advice to a budding company:
It must be an aware and committed personal choice: you may be part of a team, but you need to feel good about yourself, have your precise goals in mind and then pass them on to your colleagues. Furthermore, you must bear in mind that art is a dimension that has to be accepted warts and all, with no remorse.

A wish for your audience:
I hope this pièce will let you travel freely through memories, emotions and beauty, even for a single moment.

What inspired your show, in 3 words:
(The) need to share.

Now tell me why I should come and see it:
If you need to get away from reality to look at the mesmerising beauty of four dancing bodies and devote a moment to your dreams or simply to recall a memory of yours, Memento is the dance show to watch right now.
See you there, Nyko.

Have you been to Gorizia before? Never, unfortunately.

According to your personal experience:
Dance is… an essential part of human nature.
Dance can… dig into one’s soul. 
Dance will be… what I’ll miss the most when I don’t have a body anymore.

The most difficult thing that dance made you experience: clashing with some parts of me that I am not proud of (competitivity, envy, frustration)

The most beautiful thing that dance made you discover: that nothing remains and nothing repeats itself. That every moment has to be enjoyed for what it is.

A piece of advice to a budding company: to take all the time you need, and a little bit more.

A wish for your audience: rather than a wish, it is more an invitation to cease fire and let yourself be enchanted.

What inspired your show, in 3 words: its amazing performers.

Now tell me why I should come and see it: Première is a show that celebrates the pleasure of dancing without ulterior motives. It is a rite that puts the body and the urge to move at the core of the speech. Without taking ourselves too seriously.

Have you been to Gorizia before?
If not, something you’d like to find: A healthy and laid-back environment, where art and all sorts of exchange are at the heart of hospitality.

According to your personal experience:
Dance is... a vast world of internal and external relationships, a constant evolution of the self, of one’s body and of the awareness of being in a specific space with other people. A language, an exchange, a life philosophy, a profession...  
Dance can… create interpersonal relationships, develop new visions of ourselves and of the universe surrounding us. It can open up new social and exchange horizons, but it can also be a springboard for a healthy cultural design of a region yearning for new perspectives.
Dance will be… a primordial art, a language of union and sharing. A virtual space between body and soul, between the individual and the social world. It will always be the energy that builds up places, encounters, and human relations.

The most difficult thing that dance made you experience: being subdued to political pressure and to volatile fashion and cultural market trends which too often bend the real nature of the artistic universe. The most beautiful thing that dance made you discover: to not be smothered by difficulties, even when complex, but to always find new resources and personal motivation. To not fall into sedentarism and to always be in search of new challenges… to always leave room for discoveries and encounters, for wonder and for a generous spirit.

A piece of advice to a budding company: to strive for a continuous search, to create any type of collaborations, to question but also to reward themselves. To never lose the primordial purpose of dance as a form of aggregation and exchange. To be generous and to be listening. To learn respect this world as every other professional environment, but also to draw a line between passion and profession to avoid being overwhelmed by it. A wish for your audience: to let themselves be carried away by emotions, to not try transpose the logical dramaturgy of theatre into dance, but to gather with extreme freedom its poetry, its energy and truthfulness through movement, and to try understand the scenic relationship of the performers and the set design – because even an object, in a child’s mind, can become a character. To live the vision of this pièce as a journey, where the ultimate path is the sharing between the artist giving it to the audience.

What inspired your show, in 3 words: In this work I wanted to tell the story of my father, a drummer, who passed me down the love for the artistic quest, but also the harshness of incomprehension. I’ve broadened the vision of the father-child relationship, by analysing the role of the heir, asking myself in which stage of life one accepts the role of the other as a “mere man” and not as an idealised image.

Now tell me why I should come and see it: HERES: NEL NOME DEL FIGLIO is a pièce that starts form a vital throbbing energy, from a real feeling that shakes time and space. It doesn’t hide itself behind an idea or behind the fear of being excessive – this work wants to share without filters the beauty and the resistance between father and child, between holding and giving in, between acceptance and repulsion. HERES is a link between music and dance. It is a role play between two drummers and a dancer. On scene, we do not act, but we live every day that journey that we dedicate with never-changing intensity to those who let themselves be carried away!

Have you been to Gorizia before? 
Yes, I’ve been to Gorizia not as a choreographer but as a visitor, I have some good friends who moved there from Ferrara so I know the city. I remember a kind of peacefulness, tranquillity and efficiency. With its Karst and history, Friuli is a truly unique and open region with a cross-border flair.
 
According to your personal experience:
Dance is / Dance can / Dance will be:  what I’ll miss the most when I don’t have a body anymore.Dance is one of the most refined and complex artistic expressions, one of those that fully embrace contamination and artistic intersections (that’s why we called our festival “Intersezioni - incroci di arti performative”). Dance generously lends itself to continuous research, to encounters that involve not only bodies but also other art forms. A kind of communion, of harmony, of interaction. Dance is an all-out art related to life whose tool is the body, which impersonates and lives a story on stage that goes far beyond the titles and themes of the performance. Each body has its own story, its own evocative power way before the choreographer shapes and directs it: the dancers are bodies, which enshrine ancient lives and the seeds of future lives, of new generations.
 
The most difficult thing that dance made you experience: 
The most difficult thing that dance has made me experience is without a doubt the relationship with the other, a crucial aspect both as a dancer and as a choreographer and artistic director. An ongoing call into question, a continuous exchange both at the management level and with the artistic team. Being a team means having to relate with each other at all times, finding harmony and a point of convergence, working for the same goals in a peaceful and constructive atmosphere. Being the coach of big teams made up of very different personalities, each with their own history and needs, is a daily challenge. But it also means the magic of meeting extraordinary people and artists, and never by chance. 
 
The most beautiful thing that dance made you discover: 
The most beautiful thing that dance has made me discover is first and foremost myself. Dance is an approach to our deepest selves and it almost becomes a philosophical act, or at least it was to me. I studied philosophy at university and I tackled it as a philosophical and psychoanalytical act of accessing the depths of our soul, our unconscious, our irrational side. It is the possibility of working together and inside our own bodies, in a way it is almost like giving birth every time, every day. Creating a pièce means staging the dramas that have populated and still populate the stories of us all.
 
A piece of advice to a budding company: 
My advice to a budding company is to be very humble, perseverant and strong. These qualities are partly given to us by Mother Nature and partly acquired by strengthening ourselves with experience. It is important to target the goal but also to seek balance and harmony, which sometimes means taking a step back, always with faith, hope and trust: the latter was key to me. Having a lot of faith in life, in what happens, even if at times it may seem like an injustice or an obstacle. Always find the silver lining, work through the defeat and immediately turn to the new doors that the situation is opening for you. It is a bit like how functions the body: never focus on the painful spot, but on what is healthy and working, and then trust them.
In a more practical way, I also recommend to be able to do different things: the director of a company should be more than just an artist, or they should be able to have a very close and trustworthy collaborator who can take on a managerial role. A company is a kind of small business where you have to take care of both the artistic and the red tape side. It is a commitment of responsibility also towards society, where public funding is received; it is a complex machine that the artists would often prefer not to deal with, but I advise young people to learn the nuts and bolts of show productions and company management, so that they can make their passion a job and, at the same time, provide employment to others.

A wish for your audience:
To always have faith in art, faith in the facilities because it is when you give your trust that you can welcome different artistic acts, enjoy, and experience art without necessarily judging it. My wish is also to find the strength and energy to get out of the house and attend theatres, to always be curious – because curiosity is life! If we lose curiosity, the taste of surprise – even the risk of being surprised in some way – life turns greyer.
 
What inspired your show, in 3 words: 
Pier Paolo Pasolini. To this intellectual, man of letters, playwright and director goes my greatest esteem and affection. His relationship with his mother was one of the main reasons I decided to pay homage to this great Italian author of the 20th century. Pasolini in his most intimate, inner, existential self and, most of all, in his primordial relationship with his mother: a fundamental and universal theme of the human being. We see the importance of this type of relationship everyday: an infinite relationship, which lasts forever even after this figure passes away. 
This relationship is the starting point of my work on the poems of the “bucolic Pasolini”, including in his time in Friuli, as his childhood represented a very happy time before facing a whole series of anxieties and hardships. Going back to his origins is a journey to a happier and tender side of the Pasolini that we later get to know as an adult and mature person.
 
Now tell me why I should come and see it:
If you are curious and you feel like being moved, this show will touch the sweetest chords of your inner self, the most intimate and often unexpressed chords of everyday life. This show is unintentionally moving and we were happy to have investigated and immersed ourselves in a common depth, in a search for emotions that are intimate but also simple and common to all of us.

Have you been to Gorizia before?
If yes, something you haven’t forgotten:
I’ve never forgotten its melancholy, mixed with an incredible strength, of a city with such an important and peculiar past.

According to your personal experience:
Dance is… sacrifice
Dance can… make you fell alright
Dance will be… my ruin!!!

The most difficult thing that dance made you experience:
How sensitive and fragile the body is and how pretty much everything depends on its wellbeing.

The most beautiful thing that dance made you discover:
How sensitive and fragile the body is and how pretty much everything depends on its wellbeing!

A piece of advice to a budding company:
I wouldn’t know, Bellanda itself is a company that has just started...

A wish for your audience:
I hope you like SYMPÓSION (but maybe this is OUR wish!).

What inspired your show, in 3 words:
Hermaphrodite
Couples
Myth

Now tell me why I should come and see it:
What else is there other than watching the Visavì performances in Gorizia on 14 October?!

Have you been to Gorizia before?
When I think of Gorizia, I think of course of Artisti Associati with whom I have a horizontal relationship of trust and respect, and therefore a good home to live in.

According to your personal experience:
Dance is… an amplification of the ongoing experience we have with our own and someone else’s body, with and within space, in the same way the music we often relate to is an amplification of the rhythm of our heart.
Dance can… Dance is a word that currently carries a too general and confusing meaning. I can only speak of my attempt to open up new visions and suggestions, to create and strengthen relationships, to work on the value of difference and the importance of developing an empathetic society.
Dance will be… Dance will always be there, and it will always be an expression of our zeitgeist, but also an unruly spark of its very opposite.

The most difficult thing that dance made you experience and the most beautiful thing that dance made you discover:
In my dance there has never been a single acquaintance/knowledge that has not turned into something important in my life – and the other way round: they are two parts of the same thing.

A piece of advice to a budding company:
Always ask yourself why, and do not rely on any ultimate answer. The answer itself is not that important if you are not listening to your own truth and especially seeking it beyond trends or clichés. The greatest challenge is to be truly free.

A wish for your audience:
My wish is to be together, to have fun and to feel good. I would invite my audience to open up to some food for thought,  by simply flying away with their imagination and, why not, by feeling emotional.

What inspired your show, in 3 words:
This type of work is really a challenge, it is always new and unique, it stems from the encounter with a local musician I meet just a few hours before the show. Relationship and instinct are the key, plus it is connected to an experience I had at the Bologna train station.

Now tell me why I should come and see it:*
I won’t talk about my work, but about me. Come and see me, get to know me and discover the audience that came before you in a way that I cannot reveal. I’ll see you there.

Have you been to Gorizia before? If yes, something you haven’t forgotten:
We are from Nova Gorica. What we like about our area it's that you can get an excellent Italian coffee and typical Slovenian "Moving cake" in not even 5 minutes' distance.

According to your personal experience:
Dance is a very honest expression of the things words can't describe.
Dance can explore and go beyond the boundaries of the body and mind.
Dance will be always on our menu.

The most difficult thing that dance made you experience:  
There it's nothing difficult regarding dance.

The most beautiful thing that dance made you discover:  
Telling stories from our point of view through movement, we believe it's the most beautiful thing that dance made us discover.

A wish for your audience:
We are on the festival presenting the short part of the performance that will premiere on 17th of November at SNG Nova Gorica.

What inspired your show, in 3 words: 
Perpetuum Mobile, Leonardo Da Vinci, art

Now tell me why I should come and see it:
Our purpose it's to give an audience a unique experience of contemporary dance, that promotes diversity and explores the moving borders.