Please can you introduce yourself and tell us more about your background?

“My name is Matteo Marfoglia and I’m the Artistic Director and Curriculum Lead for VERVE.  Before I became a maker and Artistic Director, I was a dancer myself and I danced in many companies around Europe such as Introdans in The Netherlands as well as National Dance Company Wales so I experienced company life as a dancer, before I moved into making my own work.”

Can you tell us more about your debut creation for the company?

“We have created a new work – for nine dancers; it will be double-casted. For the work, we have been talking a lot about what beauty means for us – how can we offer beauty? How do we perceive beauty and how can we challenge what kinds of beauty there are?

We have talked a lot about what it is for us as individuals, what it is for us as a collective, what makes us vulnerable in beauty and what makes us powerful and how can we project that beauty to who is watching us so they can almost surrender to what they see.”

How has the creative process been so far?

“It has been great to be in the studio for the first time since I got this role as VERVE’s Artistic Director. It’s also great to see how the dancers have responded to me because I think it can be challenging for young dancers.  I say “I choreograph” but I prefer to say “we choreograph”.  I work very collaboratively and I demand a lot of their creativity in the space. They have been extremely open and very supportive with me, with themselves and with each other.”

What can we expect to see in the finished work?

“What we would like to present is an offer – an offer to the audience to see beauty, to feel beauty – that is something that’s important for us; that we are always attracted to something that we see more than we feel. So we are hoping to bring the audience on a journey to feel something through what they see. An offer of hope and of beauty and an offer to surrender for 16 minutes of their life.”