Italian-born, Norway-based choreographer and dancer Francesco Scavetta is co-founder and director of dance company Wee, one of Norway’s leading dance companies. For the past three weeks, he has been working closely with our third-year students developing new work for Graduation 2018.
Scavetta’s choreographic approach is highly collaborative and improvisational, stylistically incorporating elements of release-technique, contact-improvisation and Tai Chi. Often adopting a multi-disciplinary approach to working, Scavetta’s productions are characterised by a mix of theatre, dance, visual elements and story-telling. Recent productions including On the moon and the day after, Sincerely Yours, Lost Accidentally and Hardly Ever have toured across 36 countries in Europe, South, Central and North America and Asia.
Scavetta’s theatrical style is described as poetic, playful, witty and surprising. His latest production Hardly Ever (2015,) like a number of Scavetta’s previous productions, investigates truth and falsehood and the gap between expectations and the unexpected.
We invited Francesco to share a little about the creative process.
"The performance deals with choreographic and compositional issues that see the body and the movement as central elements. " Francesco Scavetta
“To create a Graduation performance means for me to focus on the students, offering them a process that can inform their bodies with new knowledge, while affecting their vision with new awareness. By focusing on the quality of the approach to personal research, I kept challenging their individual processes, trying to foster a positive, non-judgemental thinking. The performance deals with choreographic and compositional issues that see the body and the movement as its central element. Each performer needs to be very alert, present and calm, grounded and reactive to respond to the group, to dialogue with each other movement and be part of the flow. They need to make inspired choices in the structured improvisation, continuously triggering their inner landscapes and tuning dynamics. I hope that the work will resonate in them longer than the performance itself.”
Catch the final work Hunting Family #5 as part of NSCD Graduation 2018 until Saturday 7th July at Riley Theatre.
