a project with Anouscka Brodacz, Francesca La Cava and Antonio Taurino for Boarding Pass Plus
The NYC Room (Curated by Valeria Orani and supported by La MaMa Theatre)
My involvement in this project is triggered in the preventive phase with the mediation of the partner La MaMa Theater and with the management of the partnership.
The first step of my curatorship was to understand the intent of the artistic direction and the profound motivations that pushed this research to land in New York.
In accepting this curatorship, I set myself the goal of creating a compatible path that would return an exhaustive vision of the points of contact between the object of the project and the chaotic and changing nature of a metropolis, a crossroads of peoples, traditions, cultures, and languages.
In fact, the type of work to be tackled took time.
Dwell on the evolution of identity roots and study their gentrification?
But which identity roots among the myriads present in the city?
Looking for dance expressions that would reflect, for example, the uprooting of popular Italian dances? African? Mediterranean?
Everything seemed too complex and chaotic to be tackled in such a short residence. The risk was to remain on the surface, in an incipit, not being able to go beyond this and at the same time excluding the real possibility of creating effective professional connections.
I wanted to dwell on another aspect. Indeed, I wanted to create an ideal path that would allow us to explore not so much the identity roots of the past and their transformation but rather the observation of how a new identity root is actually born, Contemporary. What are the anthropological and social ingredients that constitute a unique identity in its own right, different from those that are part of our historical and cultural baggage? I want to define this as New York City's own identity: a long and unstoppable flow that takes shape in the melting pot, in protests, in the affirmation of one's rights, in the claim of one's identity in the magnum sea of identities. It sounds like an oxymoron, but it has a much deeper sense than it seems.