The 38th edition of FDE – the Contemporary Dance Festival in Bergamo: “EXERCISES ON THE THRESHOLD”

If yesterday was the perfect day, today is the moment to cross over.

To cross the body and the space. To cross the habits of the gaze and the consolidated forms of presence. The festival becomes a collective exercise on the threshold: a shared time in which to stop, listen, and practice passage, without haste to arrive.

Exercises on the Threshold is born as an invitation to this time of passage. A set of artistic practices that place the body at the center as porous territory, crossed by breaths and gazes. The threshold thus becomes an active space: it does not separate, but brings into contact; it does not indicate one direction, but opens onto many.

The performances and actions of this edition interrogate the multiformity of gesture, breath as shared matter, the border as a space of permanence and transformation. Each proposal offers itself as a practice of attention and a device of listening, capable of activating new proximities between bodies and imaginaries. A collective exercise of crossing, in which presence is built in the time of relation.

Inhabiting this threshold together with us will be the festival’s partner companies, mk by Michele Di Stefano and Cult of Magic with their new productions, alongside the research of Jacopo Jenna, Masako Matsushita, Gennaro Lauro, Elisabetta Consonni, Daniele Albanese, Giuseppe Comuniello, Irene Russolillo, Fabritia D’Intino, and Virgilio Sieni. Joining them will be the emerging choreographers featured in the evening This Must Be the Space: Noemi Piva, Glenda Gheller, and Ludovica Messina.

The gaze turned toward the international scene meets France this year, with the presence, for the first time at the festival, of François Chaignaud, Dorothée Munyaneza, and Simon Le Borgne.

We will also return to cross one of our most significant thresholds: the sites of the Venetian Walls, which for the second year will host the special project Spazio MURA, once again transforming into a landscape of relation, listening, and shared practice.

This year FDE also had the chance to venture beyond its borders with extra festival dates, hosting performances by Matteo Sedda within ORLANDO, CollettivO CineticO at Lazzaretto Estate, and Arearea for the celebrations of Sant’Alessandro.

To cross, then, does not simply mean passing from one place to another, but dwelling within movement, letting oneself be transformed by encounter, inhabiting together a space that remains open.

It is from this shared practice of listening and presence that the festival continues to take shape, renewing each time the possibility of imagining new relationships between bodies, places, and visions.

Flavia Vecchiarelli – Artistic director