La Biennale di Venezia

14th International Festival of Contemporary Dance

AnD NoW!

Director Marie Chouinard

Venice, 13 > 25 October 2020

with the support of the Regione del Veneto

Claudia Castellucci Silver Lion for Dance

Thursday 15 October – Ca’ Giustinian – 12 noon

awards ceremony

We have long known this sober, serious, minimalist and demanding choreographer, who works with sacrality at her art.

But she recently astonished us with her piece choreographed to Catalogue des oiseaux by Olivier Messiaen.

She may even have astonished herself, for it revealed, with a sobriety of expression, in delicate and always discrete epiphanies, that which takes us back to the origins of creation, to our love for dance in particular, and art in general.

Marie Chouinard

Claudia Castellucci (Cesena, 1958) is the co-founder, with Romeo Castellucci and with Chiara and Paolo Guidi, of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, a theatre company that since the 1980s has established its reputation internationally with a radical reinvention of the language for the stage. Dedicated primarily to writing and teaching, she is the founder of various educational experiences: in the late 1980s, she inaugurated the Scuola Teatrica della Discesa, which combined philosophy and the practice of theatre. Then came Stoa, dedicated to rhythmic movement, which developed into Calla (in 2010) and École du Rythme (in 2011 in Bordeaux, for the Biennale of Urban art). After 2015 she pursued her original idea of a school conceived as a work of art, with Mòra, leading to her work Verso la specie, dance that takes the metrics of archaic Greek poetry as its model, presented at La Biennale di Venezia. In 2012 she concentrated on composing and performing the monologue Il regno profondo, a long confession divided into several parts: La vita delle vite and Dialogo degli schiavi, to which in 2017 she added Perché sei qui? in which she shared the stage with Chiara Guidi. She moved into the field of figurative arts with I Passanti – mostra di ritagli dei giornali and La celebrazione dei gesti istoriali (2012). In 2014 she founded the Scuola Cònia, a summer school for techniques of representation supported by various teachers, and in 2016 inaugurated Catalysi, a school residency for production and contextual theoretical study.

She pursued her work in theatre, writing the dialogues for several works by Romeo Castellucci (Metope del Partenone, Go down Moses, Democracy in America and The Minister’s Black Veil).

In 2019 the experience of the Scuola Mòra ended as it merged with the Compagnia Mòra. In that year the Company premiered the dance All’inizio della città di Roma.

In the past the Silver Lion, dedicated to promising young artists in dance, or to the institutions that have distinguished themselves for cultivating new talents, has been awarded to Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (2010), to Michele Di Stefano (2014), to Dana Michel (2017), Marlene Monteiro Freitas (2018), Steven Michel and Théo Mercier (2019).