Girls just wanna have…AIR
Breathing Room by Salvo Lombardo feat. Luna Cenere closes Dance Week, celebrating female creativity.
A performance that transforms breath into a poetic act: an expanded space in which to lose control, listen to the voice, and inhabit an environment in constant construction—between body, sound, and meditation.
Concept, texts, voice, and environment: Salvo Lombardo
Dramaturgy inspired by Il silenzio è cosa viva by Chandra Livia Candiani
Words offered as a gift by Fabio Acca, Michele Di Stefano, Carlo Lei, Cristina Kristal Rizzo, Alessandro Sciarroni, Alessandro Tollari
Featuring (in alphabetical order): Philippe Barbut, Marta Ciappina, Marco D’Agostin, Nicola Galli, Silvia Gribaudi, Matteo Marchesi, Francesca Pennini, Cristina Kristal Rizzo, Irene Russolillo
Sound design: Fabrizio Alviti
Musical quotations from Ira by Iosonouncane
Production: Chiasma
With the support of Lavanderia a Vapore (Collegno)
With the contribution of MIC – Ministry of Culture
Year: 2022
Duration: 45 minutes
What moves breath between things: that through-breathing, that narrow opening between taking and giving, between stealing fragments of the world and releasing breath back into a world in pieces?
With Breathing Room, Salvo Lombardo leans into breath, approaching it as a poetic act. The work primarily consists in the invention of an ideal, expanded space in which to “catch one’s breath” and to practice the loss of the artist’s control over the artistic act itself.
The dramaturgy—drawing inspiration from Il silenzio è cosa viva by Chandra Livia Candiani—is shaped by a series of prompts and suggestions that Salvo Lombardo has received over time as gifts from different people, colleagues, and friends. These contributions help train breath as a substance of meaning and as an open field of signification.
Conceived as an environment in constant construction, Breathing Room is a performance grounded in voice as well as in the body: a room, an ideal perimeter of relationship, informed by a voice that projects speech and evokes action—somewhere between oral meditation, guided practice, environmental sound installation, and performative podcast.
Each activation of this “breathing apparatus” constitutes a unique, non-reproducible event. It is based on an invitation to an artist from the field of dance and performance to inhabit this relational perimeter together with the audience, through the activation of a performance determined in real time—without rehearsals, previews, or future repetitions—made possible by the combination of suggestions from the ambient voice and those the performer receives through headphones, deciding how and whether to act upon them.
In this way, the invitation becomes an act of complicity as well as a radical expression of being-now, and an opportunity to question—through breathing—the principles of authority and individual power that underpin the art production system. An invitation to be carried along, an attitude of listening, an exercise in vulnerability and relationality that can suggest an act of mutual care.
Breathing Room is part of an ongoing reflection on “care” developed together with Lavanderia a Vapore in Collegno, where Salvo Lombardo is an associated artist.
Salvo Lombardo is a performer, choreographer, multimodal artist, and curator of performative projects. Over the years, he has developed a research practice spanning dance, theatre, and visual arts, with particular attention to video languages and relational art. Since 2016, he has been Artistic Director of Compagnia Chiasma. He is currently an associated artist of the MilanOltre Festival and Lavanderia a Vapore.
His works and research projects have involved collaborations with numerous festivals, theatres, museums, and independent spaces in Italy and abroad, including the Théâtre National de Chaillot (FR), Attakkalari Dance Company (IN), Triennale Milano, Aura Dance Theatre (LT), Romaeuropa Festival, Teatro di Roma, Museo Ara Pacis, GAM Roma, MAXXI L’Aquila, Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Museo del Novecento Milano, Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia, BE Festival (UK), Fondazione H401 (NL), La Briqueterie CDCN (FR), Dans Brabant (NL), Tanec Praha Festival (CZ), the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris (FR), Teatro Nazionale della Toscana, Aterballetto, Scenario Pubblico, ORBITA, MART, Short Theatre Festival, Polo del ‘900, Anghiari Dance Hub, Attraversamenti Multipli Festival, Kilowatt Festival, and Teatri di Vetro.
From 2012 to 2015, he was co-director and director of Clinica Mammut. He collaborated extensively with Fabbrica Europa until 2020. In 2017–2018, he was an associated artist of the Oriente Occidente Festival. From 2019 to 2021, he co-curated Resurface Festival, focused on decolonial practices and the relationship between colonial imaginaries and contemporary representations.
In 2020, he was among the founding members of Ostudio, an independent space for artistic cohabitation and multimedia research. Since 2021, he has been Artistic Director of Interazioni Festival. In 2021–2022, he was selected for the European project MMDD – Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance. In 2021, he was selected by the European network BeSpectActive!, for which he conceived Punctum, a community-based and interactive work investigating large-scale spectatorship dynamics across 12 European countries. In 2022, he was among the artists involved in the May Town project at Schaubühne Lindenfels (DE), focusing on the postcolonial re-mediation of the 1897 Leipzig Industrial Exhibition. In 2023, he was invited by the Department of Humanities of the University of Turin to develop a research project around his works Excelsior – Amor – Sport.
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
