PROGRAMME:

H16.30-16:45 ― Welcome and Introduction
Maria Böhmer, Istituto Svizzero
Alexander Kamber, Fellow Roma Calling

H16:45-17:05 ― Anton Giulio Bragaglia and the stage as a living body
Giulia Taddeo, University of Genoa

H17:05-17:25 ― Pioneers of Abstraction in Dance: In the waves of Futurism, Esotericism and Expressionism
Adrien Sina, dance/performance art historian and curator

H17:25-17:45 ― Q&A

H17:45–18:00 ― Short break

H18:00-18:20 ― Futurist (dys)topia: body, technology, and the mind
Maria Elena Versari, Carnegie Mellon University

H18:20-18:40 ― Dance and Theosophy in Italy in the early XXth century
Samantha Marenzi, University Roma Tre

H18:40-19:00 ― Q&A

Biographies

Alexander Kamber is a doctoral researcher in the field of Cultural Analysis at the University of Zurich. His SNSF research project (doc.ch) examines the relationship between moving bodies and their environments in theatre and dance around 1900. By examining intersections between body practices and the life sciences – medicine, psychology, and biology – his project situates early 20th-century body culture within a history of ecological thought. He holds a master’s degree in Cultural Studies with a specialization in Philosophy and History from Leuphana University of Lüneburg. In 2023, he was a visiting researcher (Performance & Gender Studies) at mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. His current novel “Nachtblaue Blumen” was published by Limmat Verlag in 2024. In Rome, he will examine the dance experiments of the early Italian Futurist movement with a particular focus on their environmental knowledge.

Giulia Taddeo is a senior researcher in Performing Arts at the University of Genoa. She holds a PhD in Cinema, Music and Theatre from the University of Bologna, where she was a research fellow between 2018 and 2021. She was a fellow at the Centro Internazionale di Studi della Civiltà Italiana Vittore Branca and a visiting research fellow at IASH – Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of the books: Un serio spettacolo non serio. Danza e stampa nell’Italia fascista (2017), Festivaliana. Festival, culture e politiche di danza al tempo del “miracolo italiano” (2020), Danze futuriste: testi e pretesti (2023).

Adrien Sina is a dance and performance art historian, curator of the ‚Feminine Futures‘ exhibitions (New York, Dijon, Langmatt) and contributor to major exhibitions at Tate Liverpool, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, MoMA, and La Biennale di Venezia. His ‚Feminine Futures‘ series, examining female artists in early avant-garde performance, includes the 2011 volume ‚Performance, Dance, War, Politics & Eroticism‘ and a forthcoming book exploring avant-garde dance through photography and experimental film. Drawing from his unique collection of 4,000+ original photographs and documents, Sina offers new perspectives on understudied aspects of performance history.

Maria Elena Versari is Visiting Professor of Art History and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University. She studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore, receiving a PhD in Art History on Futurism’s international relations in the 1920s. She published monographs on Brancusi (2005) and Kandinsky (2007; French tr. 2008; Portuguese tr. 2011), edited the republication of Ruggero Vasari’s Futurist dystopian dramas (2009, English tr. 2023) and Boccioni’s Futurist Painting Sculpture for the Getty R.I. (2016). She has written extensively on Futurism, avant-garde and Fascist aesthetics. She curated Archipenko in Italy in Milan (2021) and Alexander Archipenko and the Italian Avant-Garde at the Estorick Collection (2022).

Samantha Marenzi is Associate Professor at Roma Tre University. She studies: some prominent figures of the twentieth-century scene, dance in relation to spiritualist currents and the influence of antiquity in the interweaving of Hellenism and esotericism; Butō corporeality and performance; the relationships between visual and performing arts, particularly dance and photography. Analog photographer, she trained as a dancer with Japanese masters Akira Kasai and Masaki Iwana. She is author and curator of photographic exhibitions, performance events, dance workshops, and she collaborates with several festivals as an artist and scholar.