La Biennale Di Venezia Reappoints Sir Wayne McGregor As Artistic Director of Dance Department

Sir Wayne McGregor has been reappointed as the Artistic Director of the Dance Department of La Biennale di Venezia for the two-year term 2025/2026. The decision was made by the Board of Directors, chaired by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. Wayne McGregor was appointed Director of the Dance Department by the preceding Board of Directors in 2020, an appointment that was to expire after the 18th International Festival of Contemporary Dance, We Humans, to be held in Venice from 18th July to 3rd August 2024.

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, President of La Biennale di Venezia: “Wayne McGregor was successful in building a far-reaching project for Biennale Danza, wielding a remarkable sensibility that looks with attention to the younger generations on the world stage. Seeing him at work in the past weeks, studying his prodigious imagination and his efforts as a Maestro in the exclusive school that is the Biennale Danza College, allowed me to understand that his work deserves more time to consolidate practices and visions that are important to our institution. Wayne McGregor and I, in the name of a new fact of art, have agreed to meet in Venice once again, and so I am pleased to announce that he has been reconfirmed for the two-year term 2025-2026.”

Sir Wayne McGregor: “It has been a great honour and creative pleasure curating the last four years of Biennale Danza. During this time, we have been able to grow the dance festival into a three-week international event inviting and commissioning extraordinary artists and companies from six continents who have thrilled and inspired our broadening audiences. Continuing our mission over the next two years to invest in new contemporary dance talents, platforming their voices through Biennale College and our bespoke developmental programmes. I look forward to working with the brilliant Biennale team to drive forward an evolving and powerful vision for dance today.”

The 18th International Festival of Contemporary Dance, titled We Humans will include 7 world premieres, 2 European premieres and 11 Italian premieres from iconic dance world leaders to emerging, innovative new voices. Over 160 artists will perform in Venice with more than 80 events across 17 days.

This fourth year as Director of Dance in Venice for Wayne McGregor culminates in an epic festival exploring the very nature of what it is to be human. Unwrapping the great complexity, contradictions and mystery that is human life is a career-long preoccupation for the movement creatives invited to Biennale Danza 2024. For thousands of years, bodies moving rhythmically has been the main form of communication. According to McGregor, our desires have been expressed through our bodies historically. Furthermore, he believes that dance is within us and cannot be replaced by words alone. The 2024 artistic programme celebrates the body's ability to communicate when our feelings are too strong, too complicated or too much to bear. In those moments, it is the body that provides relief and solace. 

Cristina Caprioli has been awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and Trajal Harrell has received the Silver Lion. The  Lions  were awarded by the Board of Directors of  La Biennale di Venezia  upon recommendation of the Artistic Director of the Dance Department of La Biennale di Venezia, Wayne McGregor. The Lions for Dance Awards Ceremony will take place on 21 July at 6pm CST.

Biennale College Danza connects young talent with unrivalled learning, training, mentoring, and creating opportunities. The past four years has seen these young talents mentored by internationally respected artists including Pite, Forsythe, Xie Xin, Teshigawara, Forti, McGregor and others. This year again sees 16 young dancers from around the world and 3 young choreographers, selected from over 400 applications, who will be resident at Biennale Danza 2024 for three months, taking classes, workshops, repertory and vitally, creating new work. Golden Lion, Cristina Caprioli and Artistic Director, Wayne McGregor will lead the Biennale College Danza programme in 2024.  

In a special large-scale, site-specific commission, Biennale Danza Director Wayne McGregor will create a collaborative work with the young artists alongside his Company Wayne McGregor (in residence for Biennale Danza 2024) in the monumental Sala Grande in the Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido. A high tech, high touch collaborative project.

 

BIENNALE DANZA 2024: WE HUMANS

18 July – 3 August 2024

 

ARTISTS PARTICIPATING IN Biennale Danza 2024: WE HUMANS

 

BIENNALE COLLEGE CHOREOGRAPHERS - THIS WAS MEANT TO FIND YOU - LETHE - A SEARCH FOR THE WATERS OF OBLIVION

Biennale College Choreographers presents two world premiere performances, in collaboration with the young dancers selected for the Biennale College. 

 

BIENNALE COLLEGE DANCERS - THE BENCH

A world premiere for this choreography by the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, Cristina Caprioli, who has been a mentor and creator for and with the dancers of the College.

 

BIENNALE COLLEGE DANZATORI - WE HUMANS ARE MOVEMENT

World premiere of a new creation by Wayne McGregor, developed in collaboration with the dancers of Biennale College together with the Company Wayne McGregor.

 

CLOUD GATE DANCE THEATRE OF TAIWAN - WAVES

Dance in the era of AI: the movements of the Taiwanese dancers, translated into digital data, are reprocessed by AI and transformed into new dancing forms that interact with the dancers onstage.

 

COMPANY Wayne McGregor - WE HUMANS ARE MOVEMENT

World premiere of a new creation by Wayne McGregor, developed in collaboration between Company Wayne McGregor and the dancers of Biennale College.

 

CRISTINA CAPRIOLI - DEADLOCK

The Golden Lion of this edition, Cristina Caprioli advances an idea of choreography as “critical discourse in continuous motion”. Among her most recent works, DEADLOCK is the first out of four works of her featured in the programme.

 

CRISTINA CAPRIOLI - FLAT HAZE

Thread-thin traces running from wall to wall, time after time, until they've spun a horizontal haze. Where uncertain figures move silently still.

 

CRISTINA CAPRIOLI - SILVER

Alone together in clusters in a row in a crowd up to the sky one hundred children in empty silver coats gather in one place quiet inside, they reach out and touch your heart you listen to the silence, surrender to the view stay for a while or all night long.

 

TRAJAL HARRELL - SISTER OR HE BURIED THE BODY

The winner of the Silver Lion, Trajal Harrell inaugurates the festival with a work that exemplifies the “fictional archiving” with which Harrell regenerates historic material and pre-existing forms of dance.

 

TRAJAL HARRELL - TAMBOURINES

Inspired by The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne, this show is in honour of women who in the past had a free approach to their bodies and sexuality.

 

LOST DOG - RUINATION: THE TRUE STORY OF MEDEA

Having a non-conformist spirit and a contemporary vein, the myth of Medea is expressed as a courtroom drama, imaginatively and humorously rewritten in a mix of dance, music, theatre.

 

ALAN LUCIEN ØYEN - STILL LIFE

A director, choreographer and artist, a leading exponent in an area as fertile for the performative arts as Northern Europe, Alan Lucien Øyen chooses an analogical approach for Still Life, performed by Daniel Proietto and Mirai Moriyama.

 

MILLER DE NOBILI - THERE WAS STILL TIME

Winner of the call for an original choreography, with a vision that merges break dance, contemporary dance and urban dance with theatre techniques, the duo presents a show inspired by the world of Samuel Beckett.

 

GN|MC GUY NADER | MARIA CAMPOS - NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS

An encounter between dancers that relies on repetitive and cyclical patterns of movement to evoke a hypnotic atmosphere that alters our visual perception and transforms it into a landscape of living entities.

 

VERENA PARAVEL, LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR - DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA

Film/installation: in five different Paris hospitals, the two filmmakers survey the most innovative medical technologies for a journey into the mystery of the human body that defies physical and cultural limits.

 

BENJI REID - FIND YOUR EYES

Choreographing three performers, Benji Reid creates live photographs in front of the audience where the stage becomes his studio.

 

SANKOFA DANZAFRO - BEHIND THE SOUTH: DANCES FOR MANUEL

Afro-Colombian dance with the company Sankofa Danzafro. The show is inspired by the epic novel by Manuel Zapata Olivella, Changò, el Gran Putas, about the African diasporic experience between mythology, spirituality, and ancestral roots.

 

NICOLE SEILER - HUMAN IN THE LOOP

In this show, Seiler submits AI to a “stress test”, seeking to introduce it into the creative process with the dancers on stage. Crossing the boundaries between the human and the artificial to explore the technological body and the biological body.

 

STEREOPTIK - ANTECHAMBER

Animation film, theatre, music, and dance all coexist in this piece, a work by artists and musicians Romain Bermond and Jean-Baptiste Maillet, known as STEREOPTIK.

 

SHIRO TAKATANI - TANGENT

This show with which after almost ten years Shiro Takatani returns to work for the stage, explores the liminal space between art, science and technology.

 

VIDAVÈ - FOLKLORE DYNAMICS

The winners of the national call for a new choreography, Noemi Dalla Vecchia and Matteo Vignali (VIDAVÈ) delve into the past, borrowing stories, proverbs, games, superstitions and gestures from different traditions that take form in movement.

 

MELISA ZULBERTI - POSGUERRA

The Argentine director, choreographer and visual artist, winner of the international call for new choreographies, will bring her interdisciplinary project Posguerra to La Biennale.

 

Photo credit: Andrea Avezzù

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