Xenos. Performance Festival - program for November 14

Marta Ciappina & Giacomo Luci
Being in the Gaze
site-specific performance by and with Marta Ciappina & Giacomo Luci based on photographs by Olivo Barbieri 

Cappella del Manto – 4th level
from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Duration 2 hours

They look and are looked at, they feel and are felt
The eyes of the two performers — who create mirror movements between inside and outside, from outside to inside, in light and darkness, in the visible and the invisible — trigger a shared gaze on that dual level of reading between Olivo Barbieri’s photographic work and the surrounding reality, between representation and lived experience. The performance acts as a sensitive device that activates with the entry of each viewer into the Cappella del Manto, who is then involved in the experience of movement.

Marta Ciappina, dancer and educator, trained at the Trisha Brown Studio in New York. As a dancer, she has worked alongside Alessandro Sciarroni, Michele Di Stefano, Tiziana Arnaboldi, Marco D’Agostin, Anagoor, Simona Bertozzi, Chiara Bersani, Daniele Albanese, Daniele Ninarello. As a teacher, she collaborates with the Luca Ronconi School at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, directed by Claudio Longhi. In 2022, she received the Danza&Danza Award as an interpreter and in 2023 the Ubu Award as a performer.

Giacomo Luci dancer, performer, and choreographer. He started as a soloist at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in the classical repertoire, continuing at the Opéra de Lyon where he engaged with contemporary dance from Forsythe, Bausch, Cunningham, Childs, and Brown. Since 2018, he has developed an independent choreographic research presented at international festivals, and in 2025 works with Millepied, Chamblas, Tanowitz, and the bullyache collective.

Olivo Barbieri is among the most important contemporary Italian photographers. Active since 1978, he has traveled regularly to the East since 1989, especially to China. In the 1990s, he participated in various editions of the Venice Biennale and numerous international events. In 1996, the Museum Folkwang in Essen dedicated a retrospective to him. Famous for the Site Specific projects, he has transformed the urban landscape into unprecedented visions exhibited in the main museums worldwide.

Free entry, continuous flow access

Alessandra Cristiani & Jacopo Giarda
In the Gaze of Teodora Axente 
acted performance by and with  Alessandra Cristiani & Jacopo Giarda 
based on the works of Teodora Axente

Exhibition rooms – 6th level
from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM (6:00 PM, 6:30 PM, 7:00 PM, 7:30 PM, and 8:00 PM)
Duration 20 min

The gaze that re-sees
Everything relies on the improvisation born from the gaze that the performers deploy while observing the works of the Spanish-born Belgian artist. Together, they explore the possibilities of free improvisation as a space of interaction between the body that observes and acts, that is observed and acted upon, for a total synesthesia between human being and artwork.

Costumes Sara Butera

Alessandra Cristiani since 1996 investigates Butō, founding the company Lios and the festival Trasform’azioni. Graduated in Methodology and Criticism of Performing Arts, she has worked with Akira Kasai, Roberto Latini, Daria Deflorian, and Silvia Rampelli. With the company Habillè d’eau, she won the Ubu Award 2018 with Euforia. Best Actress critic for Un appartamento vuoto, directed by Sara Masi and Francesco M. Mortati, Stockholm City Film Festival 2024.

Jacopo Giarda  dancer and performer, graduated from the Scuola di Ballo at Teatro alla Scala. Dancer with the Compañia Nacional de Danza in Madrid, later with the Opéra National de Paris and the Corps de Ballet of Teatro dell’Opera di Roma. He has performed solo roles by choreographers like Forsythe, Kylián, Naharin, Ek, Balanchine, Inger, Bausch, León/Lightfoot, McGregor. Today also freelance, he collaborates with independent entities and choreographers such as Nicosia, Bolognino, Riva-Repele, Kratz, Ferrara.

Free entry until seats are full

LU.PA
HYPERCONNECTED
performance by LU.PA  
project curated by qwatz - contemporary art platform

Sala Italo Calvino – 7th level
at 6:15 PM and repeat at 7:15 PM
Variable duration

Efficiency, presence, and control: the body under pressure
LU.PA stages the constant tension of being hyper-connected in contemporary society, where the boundary between private life and work performance is increasingly thin and fragile. On a 90x90 cm pedestal, two performers share the task of balancing a gym ball between their foreheads while managing phone calls, messages, and emails in real-time from three different smartphones. Supporting them are Siri and Google Assistant. A fourth protagonist is the audience: through a phone number made public, anyone can intervene, modify, disturb. LU.PA makes visible and tangible the state of constant alert in which we live, where every interaction is an interruption and every gesture requires precision, concentration, and control. A physical and conceptual investigation into the difficulty of staying present while everything, inside and out, keeps moving.

LU.PA was born in Cosenza in 2017 from the union of Lulù Nuti and Pamela Pintus. The duo explores the relationship with the “other” and the dynamics of the contemporary world through performative actions and rituals involving the public. Their work has been presented in institutions such as Musée Zadkine, GAM Rome, and Palazzo Farnese, independent spaces, and international festivals. In 2022, they received MAP_PA Master scholarships and in 2023 produced a commemorative box with Giordano Boetti Editions. Currently, they live and work in Rome.

Free entry until seats are full

Noé Soulier
PASSAGES
itinerant performance by Noé Soulier 
with Adriano Coletta, Julie Charbonnier, Mélisande Tonolo, Stephanie Amurao

From the museum entrance to Sala San Pio – 4th level
at 6:30 PM and repeat at 8:00 PM
Duration 30 min.

Space and body in dialogue, between visible and imagined architectures
Passages is a site-specific performative project exploring the relationship between body movement and the spaces they occupy. The performers interact with imaginary objects, evoking new resonances and meanings in the places they poetically and temporarily inhabit. The choreography is composed of flexible modules designed to adapt and transform according to the architectural identity of the context: once supported by columns, a perspective corridor, a wide grassy expanse. Each space thus becomes an active part of the composition, redefining the structure and the experience of the performance every time. Passages is an invitation to observe and listen to the long corridor on the fourth floor of Santa Maria della Scala, from the entrance to Sala San Pio, through the moving body for a passage between real and imagined.

Noé Soulier, Director of the Cndc in Angers, explores choreography and dance in various contexts in his work, from theaters to museums, combining conceptual practice, theoretical reflection, and movement. Among his main works: Faits et Gestes, The Waves, First Memory, Clocks & Clouds, Fragments and Close Up, which stimulate the physical memory of the spectator. He has collaborated with Ballet du Rhin, Ballet de Lorraine, L.A. Dance Project, Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon, and Nederlands Dans Theater. Since 2020, he directs the Centre national de danse contemporaine d’Angers.

Free entry until seats are full

Virgilio Sieni
On Lightness / Variations
site-specific performance by Virgilio Sieni 
with Jari Boldrini, Maurizio Giunti, Andrea Palumbo

Pellegrinaio - 4th level
at 8:30 PM
Duration 30 min.

Lightness, unpredictability, poetic weavings
On Lightness/Variations is a piece for three dancers weaving Calvinian lightness with the emotion of the final days of writer Italo Calvino, whose funeral chamber was set up in the Pellegrinaio of the former hospital Santa Maria della Scala. The choreography moves between the hilltop hues of Siena and the call of the sea, generating a dancing word illuminated by the decorative apparatus and the spiritual memory of the place. The bodies, dreamlike entities akin to the sprites of Cavalcanti, manifest and dissolve, making the void vibrate as sonic matter. The gesture becomes dialect, echo, crossing between visible and invisible. Inspired by Calvino and Lucretius, the dance embraces the unpredictable and infinitesimal, weaving fleeting poetic and corporeal patterns. Finally, it reinterprets weight as an act of listening and care, transforming the space into a place of welcome where lightness is rigor, not abandonment.

Choreography Virgilio Sieni; music by Bill Evans; costumes by Marysol Maria Gabriel.

Produced by the Virgilio Sieni National Dance Production Center / Center of relevant interest in collaboration with AMAT & Civitanova Danza, Visavì Dance Festival / Artisti Associati Gorizia with the support of MIC, Tuscany Region, Municipality of Florence, CR Florence Foundation

Virgilio Sieni is a dancer and choreographer active internationally for major theatrical institutions, art foundations, and museums. Director of the Venice Biennale-Dance from 2013 to 2016, he currently directs the National Dance Production Center in Florence. In 2013, he was appointed Chevalier de l’ordres des arts et des lettres by the French Minister of Culture.

Paid entry and by reservation
Ticket: €5.00 + museum entrance
Reduced: €5.00 for residents of Siena Municipality and students of Siena universities

The Gaze in Virtual Reality
Sala Italo Calvino – 7th level
from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

The second edition of XENOS cannot but continue to investigate that immersive dimension generated in the encounter between real life and virtual life, between concrete gaze and post-organic one. The Gaze in Virtual Reality offers an immersion into the world of virtual reality with the experience WAVE by Bart Hess, with choreography and performance by Sedrig Dimitri Verwoert; and HALF LIFE VR by Robert Connor from the choreographic work of Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar with dancers of the Royal Swedish Ballet. It is possible to immerse oneself in these two worlds by wearing a headset and sitting comfortably in the dedicated space, fittingly the Sala Italo Calvino, named after the one who early on explored the complexity of the network, interconnected systems, and multilevel perceptions of reality.

Free entry with 20 continuously available headsets

Bart Hess & Sedrig Dimitri Verwoert
WAVE
digital performance by Bart Hess in collaboration with Sedrig Dimitri Verwoert
with Sedrig Dimitri Verwoert & Arad Inbar

Duration 3 min.

A solitary dance that multiplies, in a dream inspired by La Bayadère
Designer Bart Hess, in collaboration with Sedrig Verwoert, presents WAVE, a psychedelic and immersive dance film where a dancer’s body is manipulated over time through repetitions, delays, and frame repositioning. This creates a choreography in which the story of a movement generates a new kind of organism. It is a group choreography performed solo, inspired by a scene from the ballet La Bayadère (1877) by choreographer Marius Petipa, in which a prince, after taking too much opium, sees a princess a hundred times.

director Bart Hess; choreographer Sedrig Verwoert; performers Sedrig Verwoert & Arad Inbar; music: Thys de Vlieger; created with the support of Nederlands Filmfonds & Stimuleringsfonds

Bart Hess merges design, fashion, and art, exploring materials, technology, and virtual reality. His tactile and intuitive work investigates the human body wrapped in forms reminiscent more of performance art and science fiction than fashion. He produces material studies, videos, animations, and photographs, probing the tension between attraction and repulsion in the relationship between skin, materials, and technology.

Sedrig Dimitri Verwoert, artist and choreographer, studied Contemporary Jazz at the Amsterdam University of the Arts. Since 2021, he is Young Creative Associate of the Dutch National Ballet. He collaborated with Nick Verstand on Within Without II and later on the exhibition Spirituele Urgentie. His latest creation, The Ritual, debuted in 2023.

Robert Connor
HALF LIFE VR
digital performance by Robert Connor
from the choreographic work of Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar 
with the dancers of the Royal Swedish Ballet

Duration 11 min. 32 sec.

Punctual, intense, and sharp in vision
Half Life VR is a virtual reality short film directed by Robert Connor capturing the immersive spirit of Sharon Eyal’s dance work Half Life, performed by the Royal Swedish Ballet. The short film is a co-production between the Royal Swedish Opera and Robert & Robert Studios. The VR production draws inspiration from 3D dance films like Pina, aiming to present a unique artistic and immersive experience, a clear projection of the language, movements, and essence of the soul.

director Robert Connor; choreographers Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar; performers Sarah-Jane Brodbeck, Joakim Adeberg, Frida Hambraeus, Devon Carbone, Daria Ivanova, Dawid Kupinski, Sarah-Jane Medley, Nacho Lopez, Emily Slawski, Ross Martinson, Lea Ved, Johnny McMillan, Amanda Åkesson, Dragos Mihalcea, Anton Valdbauer; music Ori Lichtik; director of photography Robert Jonsson; producers Sebastian Lönberg, Robert Connor, Robert Jonsson; executive producers Catarina Falkenhav, Peter Yngen; VR 360 editing & post-production Robert Jonsson, Robert Connor; VR sound editing and mixing Sebastian Lönberg

Robert Connor is a Swedish-American director. While at Stockholm Film School, he was determined to learn the language of cinematic narration and convert it into a language for virtual reality. Robert is establishing himself worldwide as one of the pioneers of incredible VR cinematic experiences.

Sharon Eyal, co-founder, co-artistic director, and choreographer of L-E-V. She danced with the Batsheva Dance Company (1990-2008) and began choreographing in the Batsheva Dancers Create project. She has created works for international companies and in 2013 founded L-E-V with Gai Behar. In recent years, the company has performed over 200 shows at international festivals and theaters such as Joyce Theatre, Sadler’s Wells, and Montpellier Danse Festival.

The experience Half Life VR by Robert Connor is distributed by PRO|D|ES Caravan. 

PRO|D|ES Caravan is an action of the PRO|D|ES Project - Extended Digital Promotion of Dance, a collaboration between Cro.me, COORPI, and Compagnia della Quarta, supported by MiC.