Finzioni (Fictions) by Lupa Maimone, presented as part of the “Attraverso Sant’Orsola” evening, is a project that explores choreographic language between object, dance, and figure, where the body, in a state of continuous becoming, gives life to shifting forms and nonlinear situations.

The project unfolds as a series of disconnected moments, dreamlike sequences that together construct a surrealist universe.
Each scene, like a fragment of a dream, follows its own inner logic, where body and environment become distorted.
Every gesture is a small fiction that forms and dissolves like a game of deception and revelation: between being and appearing, the body shatters, reassembles, and transforms.



Oltrenotte

Florence

On-Site Exploration 2025

Fabbrica Europa

Finzioni

Estudio para una extracción (Study for an Extraction), presented as part of the “Attraverso Sant’Orsola” evening, is a dance solo by choreographer and dancer Poliana Lima, based on her previous work Oro Negro.
The piece unfolds as a moving portrait, sensitively revealing the dimensions of the invisible, the fantastic, and the dreamlike that inhabit a body, a transmuted body expanding toward a new reality.

The performance is built around the metaphor of excavation, seen as the unveiling of the multiple layers that make up a body that becomes both the tool that digs and the object being unearthed, revealing all that has been demonized by the hegemonic gaze: soft, vulnerable, and perishable flesh; eroticism from a woman’s perspective; and popular culture.

Estudio para una extracción conceives the body as a territory of living memory, a space where biographical, familial, and communal dimensions intersect and are made visible, alongside the socio-cultural, spiritual, and mythical. This understanding of the body allows for an exploration of the traces left by tacit processes of transmitting habits, customs, violence, pain, and pleasure across generations.



Poliana Lima

Estudio para una extracción

The voice is movement and vibration.

Per-sona, presented as part of the “Attraverso Sant’Orsola” evening, is an action field where the body-voice encounters an overload of images and thoughts, navigating in the intermediate space.

This habitat gives interruptions and ‘impacts’ the right to exist. The sound body opens up to different rhythms, where time is in continuous metamorphosis.

Per-sona is a research on the origin of the voice as a physical sound and as a primary communicative medium. How to give space to the different voices that exist within us? Attempts at answers, in a game of taut strings and emotional abandonment.



Blanca Lo Verde

Per-sona


Starting from a private matter, I would like to interrogate the forms that have no name, to deflagrate the concept of being daughters.

DAUGHTERS is a dance performance that, starting from a biographical point, tells about a family bond that lies outside biology. Through elements of choreographic and literary writing, it challenges the univocal conception of being daughters, and reflects on relationships whose definitions are still lacking.
The research investigates the relationship between writing and dance. Not only two languages, but also two bodies, treated as matter.
– Teodora Grano

DAUGHTERS is presented as part of the “Attraverso Sant’Orsola” evening.

Teodora Grano

DAUGHTERS 

Inferno (Hell) in Western culture is the place which more than others has inspired preachers, illustrators, painters, sculptors, storytellers, directors, musicians. It is the place of atonement for moral and material faults where the wicked are punished and good triumphs over evil. It is the place of subversion and chaos in the representation of which everything can coexist. However, a depiction of evil as the undisputed kingdom of a sulphurous devil with a tail, horns and pitchfork would be hardly credible today.
Hell is here, and it may look a lot like Heaven. It is what pushes us to make every effort to be more attractive, more intelligent, more powerful, more just, stronger, smarter, more responsible, more humble, which pushes us to compete for moral, social, economic and emotional gratifications. Hell is the inevitability of desire, the condemnation of perpetual competition in search of pleasure.
Hence the idea of Inferno, a tragedy in the form of comedy – seductive, pleasant, engaging, bright and fun – on the intrusiveness of the ego; both one’s own and others’.

As the title suggests, in the version that Roberto Castello brings to the stage at Fabbrica Europa, Inferno will be broken into pieces: INFERNO a pezzi #1, INFERNO a pezzi #2, INFERNO a pezzi #3. Highlighting the work of the performers, it will be presented just as it was created in the rehearsal room—the setting in which the choreographies exist in their optimal condition.

Roberto Castello

SHIFT

 INFERNO 

LA PRIMA DANZA (The First Dance) is a site-specific contemporary dance project exploring new performative languages within spaces of cultural heritage, redefining them as living places open to contemporary visions.

The first research phase — LA PRIMA DANZA à coups de marteau – 1st step. Open doors / A Look into the creative process — takes place in September 2025 at the Chiostro and Cenacolo di Ognissanti in Florence. Choreographer-dancer Damiano Ottavio Bigi and director Alessandra Paoletti collaborate with Italian, Chinese, and Taiwanese dancers, alongside live musicians from Tempo Reale.

Here, body and space enter into dialogue: performers merge with or contrast the architecture, transforming it into a living, sensitive landscape activated by movement and live sound.


Damiano Bigi

FRITZ Company Bigi/Paoletti

La Prima Danza à coups de marteau 1° step

Oh, well — what do you think?
Persistent action digs beneath thought, revealing something instinctive and timeless. Movement alone is enough, evoking a primal, prayer-like rhythm found across cultures — a drama of addressing someone when no one is there.

In Senza Titolo (Untitled) by Romeo Castellucci, this idea takes shape through a simple setup: a golden tube with a microphone, and ten participants of different ages and backgrounds. One by one, each wets their long hair and rhythmically strikes the tube, the amplified sound filling the space. The action repeats in a continuous, meditative flow.



Romeo Castellucci

Senza Titolo

After its first explorations in 2024, SHIFT returns to Florence with a second phase marking a crucial moment in the project’s journey. As part of Fabbrica Europa 2025, this stage unfolds as a process in constant transformation, accompanying and supporting European and Mediterranean artists in imagining new scenarios for choreographic and performative creation.

This second phase focuses in particular on the relationship between performance, space, and audience, fostering a shared reflection on the value of heritage—urban, historical, architectural, emotional—in Florence as a living, dynamic material able to host and transform the artistic experience for spectators.

From last year’s explorations at the Parco delle Cascine, the Ciminiera di Novoli, and the Sant’Orsola monastery-in-progress, to Florence’s historic cloisters, the city becomes a laboratory where emerging and established artists confront new languages, formats, and modes of reception.






Attraverso Sant’Orsola

SANT'ORSOLA_4 ARTISTS

PRIMA DANZA_CHIOSTRO OGNISSANTI

On-Site Exploration is the first activity of the Creative Europe project SHIFT. It will commence in Florence at FABBRICA EUROPA with the first gathering of all project partners, advisory board, invited resident artists, experts, and citizens. A four day gathering and exploration in order to investigate, rehearse, discuss and focus on exploring new politics of creation and shared relationships of performance spaces and artistic creations. 

Hamdi Dridi

Benjamin Kahn

La Chachi

Damiano Ottavio Bigi

On_Site Exploration

While merging and intertwining with nature, three young girls create a metaphorical and visionary narrative of their present condition and their projections towards the future. 
Through their lightness, disorientation, vitality, and strength, they embark on a choreographic journey facing high and low tides, turbulence and contradictions, calm and turmoil. Guided by absurd questions the oranges reflect the path of the protagonists in their delicate passage to adulthood and guide us in a poetic reflection on our lives. Photos © Nuanda Sheridan & Sofia Quercetti

Florence

Events

On-Site Exploration 2025

On_Site Exploration

Impressions from Florence