as part of Secret Florence 2026

CAPPELLONE DEGLI SPAGNOLI h 18:30
LA PRIMA DANZA
choreography by Damiano Ottavio Bigi and Alessandra Paoletti (Italy)

CHIOSTRO VERDEh 19:00
THE BUTTERFLY DREAM
choreography by Ahn Aesoon (Korea)

with Nae-ui Kim, Ji-hyung Kim, Song-yeon Park, Hyeon-seok Lee, You-joung Lim,
and traditional dancer Joung-youn Son

La Prima Danza / The Butterfly Dream is a site-specific contemporary dance project resulting from the collaboration between Fondazione Fabbrica Europa, Bigi Paoletti/Fritz Company by Damiano O. Bigi and Alessandra Paoletti, and Ahn Aesoon Company (Korea). The project is supported by the 2025 Kore·A·Round Culture – Bilateral International Collaboration Program for Arts & Culture.

The project originated from the idea of transforming sites of historical, architectural, and artistic heritage into spaces for performative experience, establishing a profound connection between territory, place, artwork, and audience.
The performance premiered in South Korea in October 2025 at Nakseonjae Hall in Changdeokgung Palace, Seoul, and is now being presented in Italy between June and July in venues with diverse historical and architectural characteristics, offering new resonances and further opportunities for interaction between body, memory, and landscape.

La Prima Danza / The Butterfly Dream draws inspiration from the complex history of Changdeokgung Palace, a heritage site marked by political transformations, destruction, reconstruction, and ongoing processes of memory-making that remain, even today, not entirely reconciled. Once a royal residence and ritual space, later scarred by war and colonial occupation, and now a museum site, the palace is approached as a spatial and symbolic device that embodies a trajectory shared by many other sites, where layers of architecture from different periods have accumulated over time, leaving both tangible and intangible traces.

Starting from the Korean context, the work expands toward a broader and more universal perspective, resonating with other sites that have undergone processes of transformation and re-signification and that, like the Cappellone degli Spagnoli and the Chiostro Verde within the Santa Maria Novella complex, preserve multiple layers of histories, narratives, and temporalities in a constant tension between past and present.

Their historical density thus becomes a field for choreographic and dramaturgical research, while the performance acts as a tool for mediation and activation, inviting audiences to perceive these spaces not as closed entities of the past, but as active frameworks in which different layers of history continue to generate contemporary resonances.

Bigi Paoletti FRITZ Company is a dance-theatre company founded in 2020 by Damiano Ottavio Bigi, a dancer and choreographer formerly of the Tanztheater Wuppertal under Pina Bausch, who has worked with Dimitris Papaioannou, among others, and Alessandra Paoletti, an actress, writer, and director active in dance theatre and contemporary dance, who has led numerous international projects and collaborated for many years as a guest director with the Istanbul Municipal Theatre. Active together since 2013, when they began their collaboration with Yuvaya Dönmek, Babam için, created for the Istanbul Municipal Theatre, they have developed a practice situated at the intersection of dance, theatre, and visual arts, interweaving creation, pedagogy, and site-specific practices. Their work explores compositional, dramaturgical, and kinesthetic structures often inspired by scientific models, giving rise to performative universes that inscribe themselves in bodies and expand into space and landscape, redefining the relationship between presence, environment, and perception. Following the premiere of Un Discreto Protagonista (2022), the company has presented its work at major international festivals and theatres in Europe and Asia and is supported by international partners.

Ahn Aesoon Company, founded in 1985 and directed by Ahn Aesoon, blends Korean identity with contemporary sensibilities in a choreographic style that reinterprets Eastern traditions and concepts. Ahn’s work was awarded the 1998 Grand Prix at the Rencontres Chorégraphiques de Bagnolet and is documented in the Oxford Dictionary of Dance and the International Dictionary of Modern Dance. Over more than forty years of activity, she has transformed elements such as shamanism, ritual performance, and kokdu into a contemporary language, and today the company continues to explore choreographic possibilities capable of transcending cultural boundaries.

production: Fondazione Fabbrica Europa per le arti contemporanee and Ahn Aesoon Company
a work by Bigi Paoletti FRITZ Company and Ahn Aesoon
performers: Nae-ui Kim, Ji-hyung Kim, Song-yeon Park, Hyeon-seok Lee, You-joung Lim
traditional dancer: Joung-youn Son
costume design: Seonoc Im
sound design: Jung-hoon Pi
sound engineer Ju-won Jeon
project direction: Maurizia Settembri
production: On Sim (Korea), Alice Chiari with Greta Poli (Italy)
with the support of Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (Korea), KOFICE (Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange), 2025 Kore.A.Round Culture – Bilateral International Collaboration Program for Arts & Culture (Korea) | project selected by KOFICE, 2025 Kore.A.Round Culture
partners: Fabbrica Europa, Secret Florence, Florence Dance Festival, Comune di Firenze, CROSS Festival, Fondazione Egri Danza CRID, Comune di Verbania, CRID Sardegna – Centro di rilevante interesse per la Danza, ResExtensa / Porta d’Oriente – centro di produzione della danza

SECRET FLORENCE, one of the festivals of the Estate Fiorentina programme, reaches its eleventh edition in 2026. The project, developed by five internationally active Florence-based organizations – Fabbrica Europa, Lo schermo dell’arte, Musicus Concentus, Tempo Reale, and Centro Nazionale di Produzione per la Danza Virgilio Sieni – is conceived for a series of mostly little-known or otherwise familiar spaces reinterpreted in unexpected ways. Within these sites, dance, music, visual arts, and film events are shaped each time by the distinctive architectural and acoustic characteristics of the venues. All artistic proposals are conceived specifically for their context, creating a unique connection with the territory; in some cases, they also represent absolute premieres on the international contemporary arts scene.

photo (detail): Lim Tae Joon