Damiano Ottavio Bigi & Alessandra Paoletti | Ahn AesoonLA PRIMA DANZA / The Butterfly Dream - Fabbrica Europa

LA PRIMA DANZA / The Butterfly Dream is a site-specific contemporary dance project born from the collaboration between Fondazione Fabbrica Europa, Ahn Aesoon Company, and Damiano O. Bigi and Alessandra Paoletti | Fritz Company. The project aims to transform sites of historical and artistic heritage into performative spaces of experience, fostering a profound connection between place, architecture, and dance.

The performance premiered in Seoul in October 2025 at Nakseonjae Hall, within Changdeokgung Palace, and is presented in Italy between June and July 2026 in a range of venues whose distinct historical and architectural characteristics offer new resonances and further possibilities for exploring the relationship between body, memory, and landscape.
The project draws inspiration from the complex history of Changdeokgung Palace, understood as a place shaped by political transformations, destruction, reconstruction, and ongoing processes of rewriting collective memory that remain, even today, only partially reconciled. Once a royal residence and ceremonial site, later scarred by war and colonial occupation, and now a museum complex, the palace is approached as both a spatial and symbolic device, embodying a trajectory shared by many other places where architectures from different historical periods accumulate, leaving both tangible and intangible traces.

Starting from the Korean context, the work expands towards a broader, universal perspective, resonating with other sites that have undergone similar processes of transformation and re-signification. Within this framework, architectural and cultural heritage sites emerge as particularly meaningful contexts: places shaped by time that preserve a complex weave of histories, narratives, and temporalities, held in a constant tension between past and present.

Their historical density thus becomes a field for choreographic and dramaturgical research, while the performance functions as a tool of mediation and activation, inviting audiences to experience these spaces not as static relics of the past but as living, active environments in which historical and symbolic layers continue to generate contemporary resonances.

The work unfolds in two parts: La Prima Danza, choreographed and directed by Damiano O. Bigi and Alessandra Paoletti, and The Butterfly Dream, created by Ahn Aesoon. Both sections are adapted to the specific context of each venue, modulating the use of space and the performance pathway in relation to the environments that host them.