From Below the Earth and Across the Sea:

The Chthonic Choreography of Emma Cianchi

- By Anna Botta and Jim Hicks, with Emma Cianchi and Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani

Dancers from Emma Cianchi's ArtGarageDanceCo. Front: Tonia Laterza, Gaia Mentaglia; Back: Maria Anzivino, Pearl May Hubert. Photo courtesy of Jacob's Pillow.

Editor’s note: As will be clear, the following conversation with the Massachusetts Review’s Executive Editor, Jim Hicks, and the co-editor of our “Mediterraneans” issue, Anna Botta, was conducted just hours before the première of the choreographer Emma Cianchi and ArtGarageDanceCompany’s new performance, The Sea that Unites Us. After the dance that evening, the choreographer told the audience more about her inspiration. She commented, “When I came here, I had the idea of working on the theme of the journey. When I got to Jacob’s Pillow, however, I immediately felt that I also needed to bring something here from my land, which is rich in mythology. And I thought of the legends of female figures present in the story of the Aeneid (an ancient, classic story on the theme of the journey), and especially the prophets known as sibyls. The sibyls greet travelers, and they write their destinies on oak leaves, which may be scattered by the wind. Because the Aeneid is so well known, in Italian one often speaks of sibylline messages, which are mysterious and important, but difficult to decipher.” Cianchi added that the sibyl in the Aeneid, the Cumaean Sibyl, is from Pozzuoli, her hometown. And she noted as well that, although there are many works of theater based on classical texts, there is very little dance. (Until now, we should add.) Our conversation was held on Zoom, in Italian, then translated by Jim Hicks and edited by Anna Botta, with minor changes for clarity and concision.

(The Solfatara crater, Campi Flegrei, Italy. Photo by Donar Reiskoffer, CC BY-SA 3.0)
 

Jim Hicks: We should begin by making it clear that neither Anna nor I are dance scholars. We are fans, however; we’ve followed modern dance for over thirty years. But mainly we’re professors of comparative literature, and I’m also an editor and translator. We’ll do what we can, but this will be an interview with non-specialists.

Emma Cianchi: You’ve already told us, though, that the theme of our performance is particularly interesting to you?

Anna Botta: Yes, Jim is the editor of the Massachusetts Review, where our interview will be published, and I study Mediterranean culture, so I’m particularly interested how your choreography will treat this theme. We should also excuse ourselves because we haven’t yet seen the performance. We’ll see it for the first time this evening.

Emma Cianchi: This evening will be the première, so it’s the first time for everyone.

Anna Botta: Ah, it’s the première! Wonderful!
    Let’s start: we’ve prepared a few questions, but we should also move freely and follow the conversation where it leads. Our first question is about the origins of the dance this evening. We’ve read that this is your second visit to Jacob’s Pillow. Could you tell us what brought your company here the first time, and what made you decide to come back for this second performance?

Emma Cianchi: The first time we came from Napoli with a project called “Boarding Pass Plus,” a program sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Culture. We won the competition with a proposal for an all-female project that would look at the careers of women who were cultural leaders—not just in dance, in culture generally. In this project, we had many partners, including American Dance Abroad, with Carolelinda Dickey and Andrea Snyder, and they fully supported this project. It lasted for three years and is still ongoing. And they contacted Pam Tatge about bringing my company for a residence at the Pillow.

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: The goal was to foster an exchange of our differing sorts of expertise. For the first visit, there were three American dancers; Emma chose them based on video auditions. That was at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, so it was during COVID. At the time, we didn’t even know if we’d ever manage to come here for the residency. But it did happen, and thanks to these online auditions, we selected three very talented female dancers who—along with two Italian dancers (Maria Anzivino, who will be performing this evening and a second dancer who unfortunately isn’t with us this year)—created the central nucleus of the work that Emma then developed with the other dancers who will be onstage tonight.

Anna Botta (smiling): That’s particularly interesting for me. Until my retirement last year, I taught for thirty-three years at Smith College, which is a women’s college, where questions of gender are very important.

Emma Cianchi and Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: Wonderful!

Anna Botta: It’s in Northampton, MA, about an hour away from Jacob’s Pillow. And we also often discuss the question of women as leaders, as managers.

Emma Cianchi: Yes.

Anna Botta: Could you tell us something about your dance company, ArtGarage?

Emma Cianchi: Of course. The company is based near Napoli, in an area called Campi Flegrei, the Phlegrean Fields. These days, we’re more or less in the eye of the hurricane, since we currently have an active bradyseism.[1] Our company began there, in a performance space that is very large, especially for Napoli, where the spaces for dance tend to be very small. So, we were very fortunate. Our space began as a center for creative work as well as the headquarters for our dance company.
    I’ve always been interested in finding ways to apply new technologies to performance. But as of late, in a nearly complete reversal on this path I’d be on for years, I’ve suddenly become interested in staging performances that come from nothing, with very minimal technical support. Very simple staging, with no lighting, just natural light. I’ve also become fascinated with ancient, classical theater—the techniques, dramaturgy, and stories that are a part of classical theater. So those are the ideas that I developed and brought here, to Jacob’s Pillow.
    When I first arrived, I wanted to do something based on the idea of the journey, in connection to the Boarding Pass project; I wanted to focus on the connections that can be made between people in spite of distances. So that’s how it started.
    But I then was almost immediately catapulted elsewhere, from the moment I arrived here in these woods, with this atmosphere. I felt internally, creatively, that here I needed to bring back something of my own, from my own territory. And so, I began an entire process that moved in the opposite direction. And that is how I decided to focus on the Campi Flegrei, in order to to speak about the land I come from, and I began creating work based on the story of the Cumaean Sibyl. I returned to the Aeneid, the most representative text on the theme of the journey from Mediterranean culture; that epic text allowed me to pull together all these themes: focusing on women and on the journey, with the legend of the Sibyl, or the sibyls, as my through line.
    So just to repeat, we began during COVID with a choreographic score. And then Pam Tatge contacted me to ask how the work was progressing, if we’d finished it, or if we wanted to finish it. She pushed me to return, to complete this project, and I decided to close the circle by working on the figure of woman as represented by the sibyls, and by the Cumaean Sibyl in particular, along other female figures connected to the Aeneid and the theme of the journey. People who know the source texts will catch glimpses of them, and those who don’t will have other associations.
    One thing that makes me particularly happy is that my region doesn’t often have opportunities to be represented on stage in this way. But recently, the Archeological Museum of the Campi Flegrei put out a call for cultural projects, and due in part to its history of international cooperation, our company was selected, and now the dance will also debut in Italy next September.

Anna Botta: Wonderful news!

Emma Cianchi: We’ll perform there, right in the middle of our national park.

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: In this way, the two places become connected to each other: today, we premiere here at Jacob’s Pillow and then, in September, back in our home territory, the Campi Flegrei.

Emma Cianchi: Returning to the use of new technologies: the interaction with the digital world, with video, has always fascinated me, but in tonight’s performance we will have just four bodies, some leaves, and some branches. Completely bare. The musical score will create some powerful associations; we have a composition created for this dance by Lino Cannavacciuolo, a well-known violinist. Like me, he’s from the Campi Flegrei, and we worked together to create a suggestive score. Early on, I spoke with him about the project, and he wrote an early draft. I asked for music that borrowed from ancient sources, music that came from our Mediterranean culture. And then he developed these ideas throughout the entire performance.

Anna Botta: I’m curious. Is it possible to go to the Campi Flegrei these days? From what you hear on the TV news, it seems like the end of the world there.

Emma Cianchi: Well. I’ll begin by saying, yes, you can go there. The last seismic event, on May 20th, was very, very strong. But for us, it’s a constant occurrence, which is exhausting. After years and years, seismic activity of that sort simply becomes a part of you.
     When I was a child in the eighties, I lived through a similar period, but I don’t really have a memory of it. I didn’t experience it, not the way I’m living through what’s happening these days. Now it’s very intense, with something happening every day, but it’s not how it sounds on the news.
     The news makes everything sound worse than it is. We’re living through it, and we’re not afraid. We’re used to it. People aren’t afraid; we’ve learned to manage it, or, speaking for myself, with experience, I’ve learned to manage the fear. Just to give you an idea: a magnitude 2 tremor (and most are between 2 and 3) is like the vibrations you’d feel from a truck passing by. It’s not so powerful that you feel you need to go outside.
     On May 20th, however, there was a 4.4 tremor; that was strong enough to send you outside. But we also have a lot of local expertise. As you know, the Vesuvius Observatory is the oldest in the world. So, the seismic activity is closely watched, and they’re able to make predictions, based on a great number of different, interrelated factors.
     What we don’t have is cooperation at the national level. During the eighties, they managed to evacuate the population from the entire center of the city, and, within six months, they’d constructed new homes within a given distance, according to anti-seismic regulations. Today, the present government simply places the responsibility on the citizens themselves, accusing them of constructing homes without permits. And that’s where the harm is: most of these buildings have actually been constructed by the government or by industry—there was Olivetti, INA-Casa, even the Air Force Academy. Just to give you an idea, the Air Force Academy is built on the edge of a fumarole (she laughs).
     In other words, these aren’t problems that we created. This government that governs so badly does cause us some pain. On the other hand, though, I do have confidence that they’ll be able to warn us in time if there’s going to be a major eruption. And if there is, well, it won’t just be a problem for my small town, it will cause problems for people living throughout Napoli, and for everyone, really. We’ll see.

Anna Botta: Your people are very connected to their land, and also with what lies underneath. . .

Emma Cianchi: Are you coming to the performance this evening?

Anna Botta: Yes, yes, of course. . .

Emma Cianchi: There’s a moment where Lino recorded the sound of the earthquake—though, actually, to be precise, it’s a bradyseism, not an earthquake. It’s not caused by a fault, not tectonic, it’s vulcanic. . .

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: You need to tell them that you’re a geologist. She studied geology. . .

Anna Botta: Ah, so that’s where all this. . .

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: (smiling) Yes, she starts to talk about these subjects, using her expertise, but she never mentions her studies. . .

Emma Cianchi: Actually, I left to work in dance when I was still a few exams short of the degree. . .

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: But she did continue to study, and she’s still really well informed about all these natural phenomena. So, let’s make that clear: she’s a geologist.

Emma Cianchi: In any case, this evening you’ll hear, and it will be clear that, in the musical track, Lino registered the sounds of a bradyseism. He did it in the recording studio in his home, and then he transformed those sounds into percussive rhythms for the musical score.

Anna Botta: Incredible.

Emma Cianchi: In certain moments, it’s exactly what you would perceive if you were in the Campi Flegrei. Because with a bradyseism, in addition to the tremor (which you might not even feel—because if you’re moving, you don’t even feel it, you only feel it when you’re sitting down, or in bed), at least in some places in a building, you can also hear its sound. The hypocenter is very high and it’s a kilometer long, and the result is a seismic wave that, through the substratum of rock, enters into the air and transforms into a sound wave. So, there is also sound.

Anna Botta: You’ve already given me in part an answer to my next question. We wanted to ask you about how Napoli itself enters into your work. The city of Napoli is a resonance chamber, built over empty space.

Emma Cianchi: Yes, it’s all built on tufo, created during the last eruption of the Campi Flegrei.

Jim Hicks: Erri De Luca always describes Napoli as a drum.

Emma Cianchi: I’ve never met him, but Erri De Luca lived for many years in my city, Pozzuoli. It’s been more a decade since he left. The Campi Flegrei are a sort of nature park for Napoli. In some areas, it’s impossible to build anything, so the city developed large nature parks here. The Archaeological Park is extremely important; the Campi Flegrei actually contain seventy percent of the Greco-Roman patrimony outside of Rome. There’s no other area more important, outside of Rome. And then there is a subterranean archaelogical park, formed by the phenomenon of bradyseisms; eight meters below sea level, this natural beauty was formed by the rising and falling seismic motion.

Anna Botta: It sounds truly incredible. But, of course, in the collective imagination of Americans, whenever Napoli is spoken about, the only thing that comes to mind is the Camorra—mafia activity, films like Gomorrah. It’s become a stereotype…

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: And that’s horrible, really horrible. We can understand it, perhaps, coming from people who live on the other side of the ocean, but, unfortunately, we hear the same thing from people in Northern Italy.

Emma Cianchi: Culturally, we know all too well that’s how it is, that’s how we’re perceived. In my case, however, I come from a very unusual family: my father’s family is Tuscan and moved to Pozzuoli because of the geothermic phenomena; my grandfather and my father came to study these phenomena and transmitted their passion to me.
      And my mother’s family history is even more forgotten than the story of Napoli. My mother is a refugee from Istria, so with a history that goes back to the foibe, the massacres that happened after World War II. So that part of my family has a history that wasn’t recorded in the books from the eighties and nineties. My philosophy and history teacher told me, I remember very well that, “Let’s do some serious research.” Because in those years, in the books we’d studied, it simply wasn’t there.
      But that’s how Italy is: I love my country, but unfortunately that’s how it is. President Ciampi instituted The National Memorial Day for Exiles and Foibe only in 2004, to remember the forced exiles from Friuli and Dalmatia, as well as the dead—almost sixty years after the fact. These were massacres that happened at the end of war, which Italy lost. (Although if you ask young kids today, it seems as if they don’t even know that!) And Italy paid much of its war debt to the peoples of the Soviet bloc by giving away territory in Istria and Friuli.
     So, I come from a family with an unusual history. And yet both my father and mother fell madly in love with Napoli—Napoli as it is, with all its positive qualities. In Trieste, when my mother was very small and they had to leave, they were distributed to different centers for refugees, and they were given a choice between either Civitavecchia or Napoli. They let them choose, and they chose Napoli. My grandfather had continued to work as a ship’s captain, so for them it was either Civitavecchia or Napoli, and they chose Napoli.
     This was in 1947. My mother told me that the people from Veneto and Istria—everyone who was there—made fun of the people boarding the train for Napoli. So already, long before there was today’s social media, with all its negative talk, Northern Italians already had this sort of idea about Napoli. When the refugees arrived, my mother told me that they were first brought to a part of the city that, in those days, had a bad reputation. It was inside the Capodimonte Park, which these days is a museum.
     There were eight thousand refugees, and each Neapolitan family living in that neighborhood, near the Capodimonte Palazzo, just outside the park, adopted one of the refugee families. They brought them food every evening. And if the refugee family didn’t have enough clothing, even though they themselves were poor, they brought clothing, and bedding, until the refugees managed to settle in.
     The really beautiful thing, and this is exceptional, though I’m not sure who the mayor was at that time (and I’ll close my Istrian parenthesis here): My city, Napoli, is the only city that didn’t create a ghetto. They didn’t build a ghetto for the Istrian and Dalmatian refugees. All the refugees were integrated into the city, they found jobs (there were more possibilities for that during the postwar years), and they were distributed to different neighborhoods and assigned houses that they could buy with reduced mortgages. Whereas, in Torino, Milano, Rome, all those cities still have Venetian-Giulian ghettos that exist today. They’ve changed the names, but the buildings still exist. The reception in Napoli was incredible. And according to me, here we’re back to the Aeneid: it comes from the Greeks.

Anna Botta: The tradition of hospitality.

Emma Cianchi: Yes, and it’s not just me who says this, but also archaeologists and historians. This characteristic of the Neapolitan people probably stems from the city’s origins.

Anna Botta: Jim, do you want to say something?

Jim Hicks: Yes, after you’ve closed your Istrian parenthesis, I’ll open another one. With Anna’s help, I’ve just finished translating a novel that tells the story of two generations of Istrian refugees.

Emma Cianchi: Oh, imagine that!!

Jim Hicks: One protagonist comes from the postwar generation in Istria, and the other from the war in Bosnia.

Emma Cianchi: Unbelievable!

Jim Hicks: And both are women. An older woman whose family had to leave the city of Buie, in Istria, after the war. And now that she’s old and needs some help around the house, she hires a Bosnian refugee. And that’s the story that the novel tells.

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: Wonderful.

Jim Hicks: The Italian title is La mia casa altrove. In English, it will be My Home Somewhere Else. The author’s name is Federica Marzi.

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: “My Home Somewhere Else,” okay.

Anna Botta: The author lives in Trieste, and it was published in Italian. Jim has done the English translation, and it comes out with Sandorf Passage next November. These sorts of stories are incredible.
      But we’ve been talking for quite a while, and we shouldn’t take too much more of your time. So just a couple more questions.
      Speaking about Mediterranean identity, the title of your performance today is “The Sea that Unites Us.” One topic that is spoken about a lot today, as we have said, is the tradition of hospitality. This includes the obligations for maritime populations, where you are obliged to come to the aid of those in danger at sea.
      And today this aspect of Mediterranean identity is put in question by the response that Europe has given to immigrants. The Mediterranean, which once represented hospitality, lands ready to give refuge to all, today has become a tomb, a mass grave—with so many migrants died without leaving a trace. Does your work, which takes on Mediterranean identity by mobilizing female figures from the history and mythology of the Mediterranean, confront the question of what Mediterranean identity means today in the light of these new realities?

Emma Cianchi: No, this isn’t a theme we develop in our work. I concentrated instead on the Cumaean Sibyl, and on the Mediterranean identity as localized in the place I come from. Cumae was the first Greek city, and Napoli came later, and my city, Pozzuoli, is on the coast where Cumae was located. So I concentrated on this location, out of the desire to make this territory, which is so full of myths and history, better known. I can’t even remember how many of books in the Aeneid take place in the Campi Flegrei. And Dante, of course, in his turn, with his debt to Virgil, returns to the stories of the Campi Flegrei.
       For generations, the phenomenon of bradyseism frightened people, although today it is examined in a more intelligent manner, and we have managed to survive, and live, in greater numbers in this area. People from elsewhere have written about this area for centuries, so now we too should tell our own story. Today we can look at the survival of places like this from a contemporary point of view. This land has a truly rich cultural history, from ancient times, handed down to us. So that’s what I decided to focus on.
       The problems that you’re asking about are problems that, unfortunately, have been imposed on us. I think back to the experience of my family, of the hospitality they received. . . Every life that is lost, we’ll never know what it might have become. They might have been someone who would have changed the world. We don’t know.
       The contemporary stories of immigrants are extremely moving. One member of our company is from Puglia, Antonia. She has a farming business, so she works with many, many immigrants—all, of course, with a work permit and a proper visa. And she tells me so many beautiful stories about these kids. They find it incredible that they are given the opportunity to work, and they’re so grateful that they’d do anything for you in return. They’re twenty or thirty years old, more or less her age, from her generation. And they thank you because they have a job and a home, and because you’re trying to teach them Italian, because you require them to attend school. And they would do anything for you in return. But who knows where all this will end?

Anna Botta: Unfortunately, the image of immigrants that we get from the media is very different.

Emma Cianchi: In the area around Napoli, there actually aren’t all that many immigrants, because they’ve created a sort of ghetto city in Castel Volturno on the border between the provinces of Caserta and Lazio. That way, everyone who passes through the region of Campania—and generally they’re on their way to northern Europe—are held there. Here there is not much contact with immigrants. The few there are tend to be people who are already integrated in some sense: they’re working, their children are going to school, etc. I was hoping that my son, when he was a teenager, would have classmates who were the children of immigrants—so that they could share their experiences, so that both would learn from it, but that wasn’t the case. I wasn’t so lucky. In Napoli, there are some immigrants who’ve integrated, but there are very few. There aren’t even many from Arab countries, despite our tradition of hospitality. It must be due to the lack of available jobs; after all, we’re the South. Immigrants tend to move where the economy is better.

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: I work with Emma, but I’m from Salerno, which is even farther south. And the number of immigrants there is even smaller. Very, very few.

Jim Hicks: Even if it would be a real pleasure, we probably can’t keep you both for the whole afternoon. So, perhaps, for our last question, we should return to Jacob’s Pillow? Earlier, when you were speaking about creating dance from nothing, without lighting, without anything, it made me think that, for you, Emma, going into the woods of Massachusetts must have been a bit like Grotowski going into the woods in Poland in order to reinvent the entire basis for theater. So, tell us, what has going into the woods in Massachusetts done for you?

Emma Cianchi: First of all, I should make clear that I was trained as a dancer entirely according to an American system, in an isolated cultural environment during ’90s and early 2000s in Napoli. I worked within this system for more than ten years, under a master dancer who was Swiss American, and who trained us according the Nikolais technique. In Italy at that time, that technique was little known; perhaps only the major figures in dance knew about it, at the major venues for performance in those years. It was also a moment where there was very little experimentation in terms of movement. From there I continued down my path, I studied elsewhere as well, and I later became more European in my search for new forms of movement.
       So, in coming back here, I didn’t abandon my early training, with its richness. However, when I received the proposal to come to Jacob’s Pillow, for a moment I was taken aback. I don’t know how to explain it, maybe it was Stendhal’s Syndrome, but my brain was frozen. I couldn’t believe it—even more than coming to this place—I couldn’t believe that I would be able to enter into the Jacob’s Pillow’s archive, where absolutely everyone had been, where everything had been born. So, even beyond any question of who am I, it’s what has been inspired by this place, by these woods…

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: . . . and by these people…

Emma Cianchi: . . . and by these people. For me, it’s a world in itself. Now there are so many festivals, and some might perhaps function in a similar manner, but here you breathe in this particular path, this journey, following the distance it has covered. How to define it? This particular beginning that is still unfolding. At least for me, that sensation is important.
       So that’s my perception of this place. But also, everyone here has a way of welcoming you that feels very Italian. I might be wrong, it could be that I have mistaken ideas about the sort of welcome one receives outside of Italy, but here there’s a form of welcome that is, how can I describe it? So convivial. And it reminds me a lot of my own culture. I certainly didn’t find it very different.

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: For example, Pam Tatge reads in Italian, and she speaks Italian beautifully, like you Jim, but it’s really the manner in which it’s done.

Emma Cianchi: Yes, it’s the manner.

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: We don’t feel far from home.

Jim Hicks: I like the idea of a genealogy that runs from Isadora Duncan to Emma Cianchi. . .

Emma Cianchi and Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: (laughing)

Emma Cianchi:  Oh no! But there’s also … (she pauses, and then is encouraged by Caterina) I don’t want to be too harsh. . .

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: The fact that elsewhere women in dance aren’t taken seriously?

Emma Cianchi: Exactly. Italy is probably the acme for this issue: our women aren’t celebrated, and they aren’t promoted. It’s not that the system isn’t working for me. I’m a bit older and more established now. It’s that the system isn’t working for the new generations who would like to succeed, and it isn’t working for the public. It isn’t working in a way that will promote dance as a sector of culture.
       In Italy, dance is extremely strong at the base. And it’s done at a very high level. If we look at the websites of the major companies—in Germany, in England, in France, in those countries where there’s work for a dancer (in Germany there’s a bit more than elsewhere), many of the dancers are Italian. Precisely because Italian dancers have to leave, in order to dance. We have three training venues for dance, at the San Carlo, where we come from, the oldest theater in Italy, the oldest school for dance in the world. . .

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: The second oldest, after the Paris Opera. . .

Emma Cianchi: The second oldest. . . And how many dance productions does it stage each year? Three. La Scala puts on five or six. So how many are there? And then, there’s the Rome Opera and Catania. And that’s it, right?

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: No, Palermo.

Emma Cianchi: Palermo, right. So, there’s four stages for… maybe thirty … companies? How many are there?

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: In sum, too many dancers for too few opportunities. Too few opportunities for dancers, for choreographers, and for everyone else who works in the sector of dance.

Emma Cianchi: There has been a glimmer of change in the last fifteen to twenty years. But it’s really just a single firefly. A very small firefly. It’s not clear how long it will take.

Anna Botta: So, shall we leave it there?

Jim Hicks: Yes, we’d better. I think these two have something else to do today. And besides, we have to drive over to where they are.

Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: So, we’ll see you later then. You absolutely have to see our sibyls.

Jim Hicks and Anna Botta: Yes, absolutely. Thanks so much for your time.

Emma Cianchi and Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani: Thank you!

(Left: Tonia Laterza, Center: Gaia Mentaglia, Right: Pearl May Hubert, Behind: Maria Anzivino. Photo courtesy of Jacob's Pillow.)

EMMA CIANCHI is a choreographer, trainer, artistic curator for the Teatro Bellini di Napoli’s dance season, and teacher of contemporary dance for the higher courses of the School of Ballet of the Teatro San Carlo in Napoli. She founded ArtGarage, a multipurpose performing arts center and home of the dance company ArtGarageDanceCo in 2003. The company is recognized and supported by the Italian Ministry of Culture.

CATERINA GIANGRASSO ANGRISANI works as an administrator for ArtGarageDanceCo and as an organizational consultant for other dance and theater companies. She has worked for Balletto di Roma and Teatro San Carlo in Napoli. She is also an author and editor for magazines in the cultural sector.

Note