Current Projects (2024-25)

Chapter 1: SUGAR

This project suggests a new approach to touring that goes beyond presenting artistic works in different countries. It includes performances in traditional venues, as well as site-specific and community-driven events in open spaces. Combining performances with workshops, ongoing research, and creation processes it aims to give voice and integrate underrepresented cultural groups and diverse audiences.

With ‘Chapter 1: SUGAR’, the first creation within ‘Sugar, Metal, Coal: A trilogy of site relevant extended choreography’, Giulia Vitiello explores the history and social landscape of a sugar factory through the physicality and movements of two performers. This work is inspired by the archives of La Raffinerie in Brussels and is part of a dance development project called ‘dancing from archives’, which focuses on industrial architecture, site-specific creation, and the inclusion of working-class heritage in the performing arts. This proposal aims to develop a language that links dance and documentary incorporating the material it draws from fostering continuous exchange with the communities and spaces involved in its development and presentation.

Perform Europe Grant

EUR 12,000

Partners

Danscentrumjette

Belgium

The Source Art Centre Thurles

Ireland

Matias Martinez

Italy

Artistic Works

Chapter 1: SUGAR

Producers: Dancing from Archives - Giulia Vitiello with a research bursary from Charleroi Danse Centre chorégraphique Wallonie Bruxelles and in partnership with La Fonderie Brussels

text

Interested in post-industrial architecture, Vitiello started to look into urbanism as an archive of the ‘working memory’ of our cities and population. Looking to find ways to manifest this personal/shared archive existing in our bodies, roads, canals and buildings, she looks at the ‘semiotics of architecture’ and how these spaces can function as plural 'texts', subject to continuous transformation. Cities and rural landscapes become codified narratives, poetry, if we want, and that is what Vitiello aims to manifest. ‘Chapter 1: SUGAR’ is a site relevant piece that brings the research into the fabrication systems, machines, movements and social landscape of a sugar factory into the body and physicality of two performers. They undergo various forms within the process of sugar refining, evolving from a raw material to the machinery in the spaces that processes it, to the workers handling tools or finding moments of connection and reconnection. The mechanics of the factory become the mechanics of the body – work gestures become the vocabulary of a choreography: different techniques meet creating a piece that pushes the boundaries in between dance and documentary theatre.