The performing arts centers at The Egg and the University at Albany, which jointly present Dance in Albany, are proud to present the next two offerings in the series which will both take place in early February. Monica Bill Barnes & Company will be in the Capital Region for a week-long residency leading up to a performance of The Running Show on Saturday, February 3, 2024 at the UAlbany Performing Arts Center on the uptown University at Albany campus. Italy’s NoGravity Theatre will make its Capital Region debut at The Egg at the Empire State Plaza in downtown Albany on Friday, February 9, 2024 at 8pm.
NoGravity is an Italian performing arts company directed by the multidisciplinary artist Emiliano Pellisari and
dancer Mariana Porceddu who aim to push the boundaries between art forms. Its style is inspired by the
extraordinary artistry of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque art with a focus on the theater of wonder. Beauty, dream, illusion and fun are the keys to NoGravity’s poetics.
Pellisari’s style derives from studies which run the gamut from Hellenistic theatre to the extraordinary theatre of the Renaissance and the mechanical inventions of the seventeenth century. It readopts the grand Baroque Italian tradition of the theatre of marvels: a time when the artist’s studios, which emerged in Italian cities such as Florence, Rome or Milan, designed and built extraordinary apparatuses that were masterfully applied by the great Italian artist-artisans in their mise-en-scenes to enchant the courts of whole Europe.
In 2006, Resto del Carlino proclaimed that Pellisari “is not a simple choreographer. Maybe it is better to define him as an architect of the human body.”
The company will present From Hell to Paradise. Pellisari depicts Dante’s journey through the three Christian realms: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. In his conception of the work, the dancers, acrobats and actors make this recreation of Dante’s journey completely credible. They create an environment where bodies effortlessly move across different planes, seemingly floating, flying in a world where gravity no longer exists.
A description of the show in La Republicca states, “Six acrobatic dancers apparently free from the weight of gravity, fly, hang, jump vertically; drop themselves into the void, take up again from top, cuddle, play and dance as if floating in a deep space.”
Prior to the performance on February 9, 2024, there will be a Prelude talk sponsored by the Dance Alliance that begins at 7:15pm at The Egg.
The performance by MBB&CO is a collaboration with the Dance Department at Skidmore College. The engagement is supported by The Audience Building Project, a program of the Lake Placid Center for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with support from the Governor and New York State Legislature. Additional support is provided by the University at Albany Foundation and University Auxiliary Services.
The performance by NoGravity Theatre is supported by Executive Park at 4 Tower Place in Albany.