Performance

Alessandro Sciarroni

Save the last dance
for me

Alessandro Sciarroni, Save the last dance for me © Claudia Borgia, Chiara Bruschini
Alessandro Sciarroni, Save the last dance for me © Claudia Borgia, Chiara Bruschini

12 > 13.03.22

CN D Pantin

How do you revive a dance that is about to disappear? When the Italian choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni became interested in the polka chinata in 2018, only five dancers were still practising this dance in Italy. Yet it has spanned the twentieth century: originally performed only by men, this popular dance of seduction – in which the dancers’ embrace gradually allows them to whirl around, knees bent, without letting go – was created in Bologna in the 1900s. In collaboration with Giancarlo Stagni, a dancing master who unearthed and studied videos of polka chinata from half a century ago, Alessandro Sciarroni offers a twirling and physical performance of this dance in Save the last dance for me. Two dancers, Gianmaria Borzillo and Giovanfrancesco Giannini, perform to a techno beat as a way of reviving these almost forgotten steps and adjourning the ‘last dance’ of the polka chinata. 

Trained in the plastic arts and with a long experience as a performer, Alessandro Sciarroni has been developing pieces at the confluence of live performance and contemporary art since 2007. Relying on a conceptual base to take an extremely organic form, often at the limits of the physical resistance of the performers, his work is characterized by its rigor, its coherence and its intensity. Involved in various international artistic projects and networks, Alessandro Sciarroni is regularly invited to present his creations throughout the world, notably at the CENTQUATRE-PARIS, where he is an international associate artist.