Through the Frame
When the journey begins
Visual Art Installation
A project by
Fabio Finotti
Concept, choreography, costumes, video direction
Marco Pelle
Original music
Federico Pelle
Video photography
Ernesto Galan
Danzatori
Mara Galeazzi The Royal Ballet
Luigi Crispino American Ballet Theater
Graceanne Pierce Guest Principal Dancer
On view until February 3- Monday through Friday 10AM to 4PM
«To represent the fusion between the virtual and real world – explains Fabio Finotti – we imagined a hybrid space: characters from famous paintings leave the frame, enter our reality, explore it with dance. In this way, the Italian Cultural Institute in New York wants to represent Italy as a tradition that renews itself, a past that transforms into the future, beauty in perpetual metamorphosis.”
Artificial intelligence has created a new osmosis between the real world and the virtual world. The famous book Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll must today be interpreted in the reverse direction: it is no longer life that enters the frame of the imaginary, but the imaginary that enters the space of life, melting into each other.
From an idea of the director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, Fabio Finotti, and thanks to the artistic and narrative creativity of the choreographer Marco Pelle, in the visual art installation “Through the Frame”, famous paintings, linked mostly to the current of Magical Realism, come to life through the magic of video and dance, and their characters emerge from the painting (and here we are faced with the mystery of Magical Realism) to enter the real world in flesh and blood. An immersive experience that brings us closer to reality and redefines the way we enjoy art.
The subjects portrayed in the selected works – “Hygieya” by Gustav Klimt, “Alice” by Arthur Rackham, “The Juggler” by Antonio Donghi, “Woman with a blue dress” by Bruno Croatto, “Per se e per suo ciel concepe e daughter” and “Portrait of Silvana Cenni”, both by Felice Casorati – come to life to transform into real people, exiting the boundaries of the frame through six videos, in which choreography, direction and costumes are all by Pelle. The ballets, performed by extraordinary dancers such as Mara Galeazzi of the Royal Ballet of London, Luigi Crispino of the American Ballet Theater and Graceanne Pierce, internationally renowned Guest Prima Ballerina, celebrate the power of dance and its ability to unite the conscious and unconscious, fantasies and experience, drawing and fluidity and, above all, to become a tool to take us from the dream to matter, to literally break the frame to show us that the dream is not only in the content, but also beyond the container. Indeed, it is the container itself.
Marco Pelle – Resident choreographer of the New York Theater Ballet, boasts important collaborations with well-known dancers on the international scene (Alessandra Ferri, Roberto Bolle, Isabelle Ciaravola, Luciana Paris and Stephen Hanna, to name a few). His choreographies have been danced all over the world and in very prestigious venues, such as the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing or the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In America he is known as one of the choreographers of Pose, Ryan Murphy’s series nominated for two Golden Globes. In Italy, most people remember him for the choreography of Passage, a short film, directed by Fabrizio Ferri and starring Roberto Bolle with the participation of Polina Semionova, which opened the 70th edition of the Venice Film Festival to celebrate 10 years of Vanity Fair, going viral online. Since 2017 he has been an Academic Fellow at Bocconi University in Milan, where he teaches a course on Performing Arts Management within the Social and Political Sciences department.