ŻfinMalta opens the new year with ŻfinDays, a double-bill featuring choreography by two international dance luminaries – Mauro Bigonzetti and Ambra Senatore. An annual favourite in its season programme, this unique evening of dance shines a spotlight on the versatility and raw talent of ŻfinMalta’s company dancers and introduces audiences to the best choreographers working in the region today. Cantata and Aringa Rossa .10 are two very distinctive and dynamic works addressing themes of community and connection, through the language of music, emotion, intuition, and play.

Cantata is Mauro Bigonzetti’s personal quest to read and recover the traditional musical heritage of Southern Italy. The passionate and visceral gestures of the choreography are evocative of its wild, Mediterranean origins. Cantata is an intuitive dance that stages a continuous game of opposites, sacred and profane, man-woman, sun and moon, love and violence, where music, sounds, voice and body are the main interpreters of the piece.

ŻfinMalta’s artistic director Paolo Mangiola has waited for an opportunity to stage this work since he arrived seven years ago. “Cantata speaks a language that is rooted in our Mediterranean culture. The combination of beautiful choreography, traditional southern Italian music, and Bigonzetti's unique signature are all elements that make it an excellent addition to our repertoire. I started my career as a dancer with Mauro, and my first creation with him was Cantata, which I danced for many years. Finally presenting it to our audience feels like an immense privilege.”

Bigonzetti is one of Italy’s pre-eminent dancers and choreographers. His training began at the Rome Opera Theatre in 1972 and in the subsequent four decades, he has been dancer and principal choreographer with Aterballetto and choreographed for companies around the world, including English National Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, Staatsballet Berlin, Ballet del Teatro Argentino, New York City Ballet, and Ballet du Capitole de Toulouse. In 2016 he directed the Corpo di Ballo del Teatro alla Scala, and most recently he has staged ‘King Lear with the Stuttgart Ballet, performed by Egon Madsen, and ‘Madina’ at Teatro alla Scala, performed by Roberto Bolle.

ŻfinMalta opens the new year with ŻfinDays, a double-bill featuring choreography by two international dance luminaries – Mauro Bigonzetti and Ambra Senatore. Photo: Camille Fenech

In this collaboration with ŻfinMalta, Ambra Senatore, and assistant choreographer Vincent Blanc, revisit Aringa Rossa, first created as a full-length work in 2014. Attentive to a curious, open dance, attuned to the experience of the choreographer and the dancers, Aringa Rossa takes Senatore’s compositional style to the extreme, constantly shifting the pieces of an ever more astonishing puzzle. Working with clues, games with changing rules, and fragmented scenes, the dancers eventually take over this meticulous choreography. This adaptation Aringa Rossa .10 is the encounter between the 10-year-old original and the personalities of the ten dancers.

Ambra Senatore has been director of the National Choreographic Centre in Nantes since 2016. Her dance is found in the tenuous space between the construction of action, fiction in rehearsal, and the truth of presence. Underpinning all gestures is the everyday, observed with a magnifying glass, which she shifts and reverses until the gesture becomes fictionalised, and the dance becomes theatrical.

ŻfinDays is a platform for audiences to connect both on an emotional and intellectual level. They are works that reference culture and underpin ŻfinMalta’s mission to cultivate a creative dance ensemble where dancers, artists, and choreographers, from around the world, come together with revolutionary ideas to grow a unique dance identity for the people of the Maltese Islands.

Tickets are now on sale for the return of Intimate Zfin, with Alexandra Alden and band, and you can catch ŻfinMalta on tour in April at Belgrade Dance Festival and Teatro Ariosto in Reggio Emilia, and in June in Jersey Island and the Adriatic Dance Festival, Budva, Montenegro. Download the full season programme from the website – zfinmalta.org.

ŻfinDays is supported by the Italian Cultural Institute of Valletta, and the Embassy of France in Malta.

ŻfinDays 2024 – Double bill

Dates and time: February 16, 17, 18, 23, 24 and 25 at 7:30pm

Venue: Valletta Campus Theatre

Dancers

Marti Blanco Romeu, Pearl Calleja, Lidia Caricasole, Noemi Coin Andreotti, Lotte La Haye, Jérémie Lafon, Keith Micallef, Marion Paquet (Apprentice dancer), Matteo Real, Simon Riccardi-Zani, Benjamin Spiteri (Apprentice dancer), Amber Van Veen

Upcoming performances

Intimate Żfin

As part of maltabiennale.art 2024

Dates and time: March 15, 16, 7:30pm

Venue: Gran Salon, Archaeological Museum, Valletta

Bookings: showshappening.com