The first dance / La prima danza is a site-specific contemporary dance project, funded by the 2025 Kore.A.Round Culture – Bilateral International Collaboration Program for Arts & Culture. The project aims to explore new performative languages for cultural heritage sites, redefining them as vibrant and dynamic spaces capable of bridging memory and contemporaneity.

The project

A collaboration between Fondazione Fabbrica Europa and Ahn Aesoon Company, one of the leading choreographic groups in Korea, the project stems from the idea of transforming heritage into a platform for artistic experiences that foster a deeper connection between artworks and audiences, using dance and the performing arts as a language that is at once evocative and innovative.

The first phase of the project will take place between September and October 2025 in Seoul, where Italian artists Damiano Ottavio Bigi, choreographer and dancer, and Alessandra Paoletti, dramaturge and director, will work with local dancers, with the support of choreographer Ahn Aesoon, to develop a creation that will be presented in an evocative site of Korean cultural heritage, the Nakseonjae Pavilion within the Changdeokgung Palace complex.

The performance

The first dance / La prima danza is a site-specific contemporary dance performance born from the encounter between two profound and distant visions of the world and space: that of the Italian Renaissance and that of traditional Korean architecture.

Conceived to come to life in emblematic locations, the performance creates a dialogue between two cultures which, though distant in geography and history, do not merely build physical structures but symbolic universes, each with its own grammar of forms, proportions, and spirituality.

In the Renaissance, under the influence of Humanism and Neoplatonism, space is ordered according to perfect mathematical proportions: symmetry and balance become expressions of a cosmos governed by rational laws, where man is the measure of all things and architecture reflects an ideal of immutable harmony. In Korea, by contrast, Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist philosophies conceive the universe as a flow of complementary energies, where space is alive and ever-changing, and emptiness (Ma) holds essential value — not as absence, but as silent presence, a pause that imbues meaning and becomes a perceptive and mental space.

The performance will unfold within these historically charged and symbolic spaces, where the dancers’ movements will engage in dialogue with the rigorous geometries and dynamic equilibria of the environments, translating the philosophies that generated them into gesture and breath. Through translucent stage elements, evanescent surfaces, and mobile materials, the boundaries between the tangible and the imagined will dissolve, allowing bodies to emerge from the architecture or merge into it, as though the space itself were an active participant in the dance.

The choreographic research will draw on the principles governing these two worlds — order and harmony, emptiness and fullness, rigour and freedom — constructing a movement language that transforms abstract themes into body, breath, and rhythm. The dancers’ inner visions, emotions, and perceptions will engage in dialogue with the environment and historical memory it holds, giving life to an immersive, multisensory experience.

The second phase of The first dance / La prima danza will take place in Italy in June 2026, with site-specific performances in heritage sites, whose historical and architectural will add new layers of meaning and inspiration.