
Girls just wanna have… A MEDAL
Le Palestriti by Simona Bertozzi: for Dance Week celebrating female creativity, a performance that reflects on the power of women.
Four female performers transform gymnastic training into a collective celebration, creating a language of gestures, sounds, and bodies that honours strength, grace, and shared power.
Quattro performer donne trasformano l’allenamento ginnico in festa collettiva, creando un linguaggio di gesti, suoni e corpi che celebra forza, grazia e potenza condivisa.
Double performance
Friday 6 and Saturday 7 March, 7:00 pm
https://vimeo.com/1117882946?fl=pl&fe=sh
Project and choreography: Simona Bertozzi
Vocal coaching: Meike Clarelli
Created with and performed by: Arianna Brugiolo, Federica D’Aversa, Paola Drera, Valentina Foschi
Original music: Meike Clarelli, Davide Fasulo
Lighting design and technical assistance: Rocio Espana Rodriguez
Organisation: Miriana Erario
Press office: Michele Pascarella
Photo and video: Luca Del Pia
Production: Nexus 2024–2025
With the support of the Ministero della Cultura, Regione Emilia-Romagna, Comune di Bologna
With the support of Festival Danza Estate
In collaboration with ALMASTUDIOS Bologna
Le Palestriti takes shape within the ATHLETES project, opening up new possibilities for research and composition at the intersection of dance, sport, and vocality—foundational elements of the entire project.
The work is inspired by the mosaic of the Palestriti at the Villa del Casale, a rare ancient depiction of female athletic competition.
Here, the athletes, equipped with gymnastic tools, not only exalt the beauty and power of individual gestures, but also celebrate together, honouring the winner and transforming athleticism into an act of collective affirmation.
Within the choreographic frame of Le Palestriti, gathering and converging toward a shared, vertiginous bodily experience emerges as an essential necessity—both to train the anatomies and to let them erupt.
The performers disseminate a grammar of gestures, sounds, and vocal expressions in which the emergence of each individual presence becomes an opportunity to expand personal perception and transfigure it into an act of reciprocity and expansion of the collective body.
Le Palestriti develops a raw yet fluid physicality, with feral waves that transform the space—from a gym into a porous, hybrid territory, a crossroads of relationships, ritualities, and gestural alphabets suspended between strength and grace.
Within this dynamic, the stage becomes a playground of trajectories, where bodies move through a relentless practice of listening, elevating training and the care of gesture into practices of resistance and transformation.
Choreographer, dancer, and performer, Simona Bertozzi holds a degree from the Department of Arts, Music and Performing Arts at the University of Bologna. One of the pioneers of twentieth-century choreographic revolutions, Loïe Fuller, was the subject of her graduation thesis.
From a young age, she trained in artistic gymnastics and classical dance, later deepening her study of contemporary dance in Italy and in several other countries, including France, Spain, Belgium, and England. She has collaborated extensively as a performer, among others with choreographer Tomas Aragay (cia Societat Doctor Alonso – Spain) and, from 2005 to 2010, with Virgilio Sieni. She began her activity as a choreographer in 2005, developing a path of research and production working with professional dancers and performers, as well as with children, adolescents, amateurs, asylum seekers, and second-generation young immigrants.
Simona Bertozzi practices a form of dance in which choreography becomes a territory of events—a complex system inhabited by the body—resulting from practices, thoughts, and disciplines that make creation a layered entity in dialogue with the present. In 2007 she won the GD’A (Giovani Danzautori dell’Emilia-Romagna) choreographic competition, and in 2008 she founded Compagnia Simona Bertozzi | Associazione Culturale Nexus.
Over the years, her projects have received support and hosting from major regional, Italian, and European networks through co-productions and choreographic residencies, with national and international touring. In 2008, she was the Italian choreographer selected for the Aerowaves festival at The Place Theatre (London), and in the same year, with the solo Terrestre, she took part in the international project Choreoroam, supported by the British Council / The Place, Dansateliers (Rotterdam), and Bassano Opera Festival.
With the collective Gemelli Kessler (Simona Bertozzi, Marcello Briguglio, Celeste Taliani), she won Il Coreografo Elettronico 2009 for Best Independent Production with the video-dance work Terrestre – movement in still life. In 2012, the collective created I was wondering, a video-dance work produced for the centenary of the birth of Michelangelo Antonioni.
Over the years, significant collaborations have developed with artists and scholars including Francesco Giomi, Artistic Director of Tempo Reale; Enrico Pitozzi and Cristiana Natali, professors at the University of Bologna; Egle Sommacal, musician and guitarist of Massimo Volume; Angela Baraldi, actress and singer; and Tabea Martin, with whom she co-created This Is My Last Dance, a work that toured extensively across Europe, including the Swiss Dance Days.
TICKETS
Full price: €10
Reduced price (under 30, dance schools, Liceo Coreutico Matilde di Canossa, over 65, CRAL Comune di Reggio Emilia members): €6
Reduced price (under 8): €3
TICKET PURCHASE
Tickets can be purchased online at www.biglietteriafonderia39.it.
The box office at Fonderia opens one hour before the start of the performance.
Tickets are unnumbered.
CONTACTS
Mobile & WhatsApp: +39 334 102 3554
