as part of the Fabbrica Europa 2026 festival

Dentro il contemporaneo [Inside the Contemporary] is a project dedicated to choreographers under the age of 25, developed in collaboration with the Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi and curated by Marinella Guatterini, dance critic and lecturer.

Seven performances created by six emerging choreographers who graduated from the Milan-based school in 2025 explore territories of beauty and experimentation, giving rise to distinctive artistic voices through movement, song, sound, and a precious sense of creative exuberance.
The project also includes critical reflections by Marinella Guatterini, opening a discussion on the contemporary in the performing arts and examining its languages, forms, tensions, and ongoing transformations.

The two evenings will feature:

Giovanna Seccia
Pelle
A body and an object in relationship. The body allows itself to be enveloped, hides, chooses whether to emerge or to sink beneath the surface. With Pelle [Skin], Giovanna Seccia explores this relationship, its possible pathways and continuous transformations, in a journey where Ithaca is not a destination to be reached but a place to be discovered.

Arianna Delle Gemme
Senza Coda
Senza coda [Without a tail] investigates the functions of the tail, a distinctive feature of the animal kingdom, and how its symbolic and physical essence may be transfigured within the human body. What does this organ truly represent for human beings? What elements, in our species, replace its potential functions? Often considered a limb lost through evolution, the tail becomes a symbol of the connection between humanity and a primordial dimension.

Marcello Malchiodi
Icarus
Icarus stems from the performer’s need to explore the meaning of the syndrome that shares its name with the Greek myth, through the discovery of his own skeleton and its possibilities and limitations. Just as Icarus is unable to appreciate what he possesses, the performer cannot find peace with his own body and seeks to transform it radically, to the point of struggling against it as though it were a stranger.

Alvise Gioli
In fondo alla litoranea
In fondo alla litoranea [At the end of the coastal road] is a dive… Aan immersion in apnea and, at the same time, a resurfacing. Set within a hybrid environment between the underwater world and a swimming pool, Alvise Gioli’s creation reflects on our aquatic ontology, our relationship with water, and the necessity of reconsidering this connection.

Lorenzo Dino Marchionni
Quando l’acqua diventa ghiaccio
Highlighting moments of misunderstanding, conflict, dissonance, and the unspoken, and drawing upon studies of vibration, non-Newtonian fluids, and Masaru Emoto’s research on the sensitivity of water, Quando l’acqua diventa ghiaccio [When water becomes ice] investigates the “atomic” nature of emotion in moments of confrontation with others. It explores the spark from which emotion arises—highly concentrated yet microscopic—revealing the individual’s state of innocent vulnerability and naked fragility.

Marcello Malchiodi
Prometheus
Prometheus is freely inspired by Victor Hugo’s novel The last Day of a condemned man, drawing on the psychological dimension of the condemned individual, the human being pushed to the margins and branded by society. An organized multitude judges, labels, and punishes the deviations of the individual. The performer embodies the madness imposed upon him by society, offering no resistance, like a Greek tragic hero inexorably destined to fulfil his fate.

Maria Priscilla Cornacchia
PodiÀfos
A creation that explores the relationship between the body and electronic music. Through the energy of electro-pizzica and the force of rave culture, four dancers traverse symbols connected to the earth, rebirth, and interpersonal connection, investigating how the body responds to and is transformed by rhythm.

photo (detail): Denise Prandini