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MATTEO BITTANTE
Matteo Bittante received his artistic training between Italy and Germany, at the Fondazione Teatro Nuovo per la Danza in Turin and, in Hamburg, at the Ballettschule des Hamburg Ballett “J. Neumeier”.
Throughout his career, he has worked with major companies and institutions, including Roland Petit’s Ballet National de Marseille, Teatro alla Scala, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Stadttheater Bremerhaven, Daniel Lommel’s Compagnie Aenaon and Balletto dell’Esperia.
Since 2003, he has collaborated with Susanna Beltrami, progressively moving towards a contemporary research practice centred on corporeality. With La forma dell’incompiuto (2008), the body becomes not only a technical instrument, but also a space for questioning, transformation and discovery.
As a choreographer, his research focuses on the relationship between body, identity and otherness, observing what each performer brings with them: experience, resistance, vulnerability and their personal ways of inhabiting gesture.
At the heart of his practice is the concept of “unlearning”: recognising what the body has learned in order to allow for the possibility of transforming it. Contact, weight, balance, distance and relationship become tools for questioning acquired habits and codes.
Alongside his creative work, Matteo develops research and production activities within DANCEHAUSpiù, contributing to the creation of spaces dedicated to artistic research and the training of new generations of dancers.
CAMPI#1
DIREZIONE ARTISTICA E COORDINAMENTO COREOGRAFICO Matteo Bittante e Lara Guidetti
AZIONI COREOGRAFICHE E ATTRAVERSAMENTI PERFORMATIVI Maksym Petrashchuk, Erika Di Mauro e Tejaswini Loundo
CON I DANZATORI E LE DANZATRICI di DANCEHAUSpiù e Sanpapiè/SPACCA (9 interpreti )
COPRODUZIONE DANCEHAUSpiù e SPACCA / Sanpapiè
CAMPI# è un dispositivo performativo nomade ideato da DANCEHAUSpiù e Sanpapiè/SPACCA per abitare e riscriversi in luoghi sempre diversi. Pensato per attraversare spazi rigenerati, architetture riconvertite e paesaggi in trasformazione, nasce dall'idea che la coreografia non occupi uno spazio,ma entri in relazione con esso, lasciando che ogni contesto ne ridefinisca forma, ritmo e composizione.
Più che presentare opere, CAMPI# costruisce un campo di relazioni. La creazione mette in dialogo le poetiche di Matteo Bittante e Lara Guidetti con quelle di Maksym Petrashchuk, Erika Di Mauro e Tejaswini Loundo, intrecciando esperienze, generazioni e linguaggi in un'unica scrittura performativa. Corpi, autorialità, spazio e architettura si influenzano reciprocamente, generando ogni volta una configurazione inedita.
Il pubblico è invitato ad attraversare lo spazio seguendo traiettorie sempre diverse, costruendo una propria esperienza dell'opera. Non esiste un unico punto di vista: ogni percorso genera relazioni, immagini e prospettive irripetibili. I corpi emergono, si dissolvono e si rincorrono in un paesaggio performativo in continua metamorfosi, dove ogni attraversamento trasforma lo spazio in drammaturgia e ogni luogo diventa parte integrante della coreografia. Perché, in CAMPI#, la coreografia non appartiene solo ai corpi che danzano, ma anche allo sguardo di chi li incontra.
I MILLE VOLTI DELLA MUSICA E DELLA DANZA
BY | MATTEO BITTANTE
ORIGINAL MUSIC BY Jorge A. Bosso
with DANCEHAUSpiù dancers: Rebecca Bassoli, Maksym Petrashchuk
PRODUCTION DANCEHAUSpiù 2026
COPRODUCTION SERATE MUSICALI ETS
duration 55'
A clarinet and a cello; music from the past and music of the present embrace the danced word of a pair of performers, vibrating in unison with the illusions painted on the walls, merging the fleeting moment of human movement with the eternal dream impressed in stone.
A soundscape permeated by distant sounds and contemporary thoughts merges with dance in its inexhaustible nuances, shaped and punctuated by improvisation.
The ancient walls speak; the silent frescoes—in their hushed stillness—tell their stories, and tell ours. Guardians of a centuries-old memory.
Choreographer Matteo Bittante and the dancers of his company, DANCEHAUSpiù, weave a rich and polychromatic dialogue, infused with the crystalline, diaphanous geometries of their gestures and their gazes. We dance with the mind, attempting to give form to the revelations of our soul. A privileged form of expression, in which the abstract sign is transformed into movement in the timeless search for ourselves. And awareness of the present moment becomes both light and an exercise in identity.
In this suspended space, architecture ceases to be inert matter and becomes a living stage, where historical beauty gives rise to new avant-garde visions. Performing art breaks through the boundaries of centuries, translating memory into a shared, immersive experience.
BROMANTICA
BY | MATTEO BITTANTE
WITH | Barbara Allegrezza, Nicolò Castagni, Giovanni Fasser, Maksym Petrashchuk
PRODUCTION DANCEHAUSpiù 2024
with the support of Next REGIONE LOMBARDIA/FONDAZIONE CARIPLO
duration 35'
Today, as the shadow of war is felt like an echo, manifesting in the hegemony of chaos and discord, the choreographer explores beauty, peace, and harmony. He delves into human relationships that transcend barriers of borders, ethnicity, and gender.
A dance, as a powerful expression of resistance, hope, and human connection, becomes the sanctuary for four young souls where love and solidarity unfold in a powerful and moving narrative. The "bromance," a term that goes beyond simple friendship, takes a unique form among the four artists. A choreographic texture that alternates synchronized movements with individual bodily fluidity, thus exploring the power of the most intimate union born from the shared passions, dreams, and common challenges.
ANIMI
BY | MATTEO BITTANTE
WITH | ANDREA PIRAS/NICOLO' CASTAGNI and GIOVANNI FASSER/FABIANO PARRINELLO
PRODUCTION DANCEHAUSpiù - new production 2024
duration 20'
ph Alice Colombo
Gender stereotypes can limit individual freedom. Escaping male ones means challenging cultural expectations and embracing a wider range of personal expressions and interests. Starting from this premise, the choreographer deepens his research with an interpretation that explores the relationship between two boys, one a prisoner, the other free from patterns. Two characters who manage to find interest through the sharing of common dreams and challenges. A story of "bromance", a form of homosocial intimacy that transcends simple friendship.
LE SPECTRE DE LA ROSE / RAVE
BY MATTEO BITTANTE
With TRAVIS CLAUSEN-KNIGHT and JAMES PETT
COSTUMES ALESSANDRO VIGILANTE
SOUND MIXING CHRIS COSTA
PRODUCTION DANCEHAUSpiù 2023
Duration 24'
Debut 15-16 april 2023
With the support of
Le spectre de la rose | Rave di Matteo Bittante PH Salvatore Lazzaro
Le spectre de la rose | Rave di Matteo Bittante PH Salvatore Lazzaro
Le spectre de la rose | Rave di Matteo Bittante PH Salvatore Lazzaro
Ph. Salvatore Lazzaro
Le spectre de la rose, a famous 20th-century ballet danced by the most famous dance personalities in the world's most important theatres, is today reinterpreted in a contemporary key by choreographer Matteo Bittante. Entitled Le spectre de la rose | Rave, the show brings to the stage three different artistic personalities that see Matteo Bittante himself, for years the on-stage partner of the étoile Luciana Savignano, dancing together with two British dancers and creative artists: Travis Clausen-Knight, recently starring with Roberto Bolle in Bolle and Friends, and James Pett, former partner of Alessandra Ferri in the BBC documentary Performance Live
"I retreated into solitude and danced all day, to the point of exhaustion, but the next morning that infernal dance began again. I tried to escape myself, and at night I wandered aimlessly. During the day I kept myself hidden and danced alone in the woods and on the deserted mountains." - Carl Gustav Jung
From the famous ballet Le spectre de la rose, inspired by the poem of the same name by Théophile Gautier (1837), the choreographer Matteo Bittante elaborates a personal interpretation in a contemporary key.
The memorable dream of the young girl is here transformed into an imaginative journey of a forty-year-old man overwhelmed by the experience and echo of a Rave.
Lost in his own anxieties and trapped within himself, the protagonist is overwhelmed by the spectral vision of two young dancers. Two spirits who, in a surreal and dreamlike atmosphere, drag him into a visceral dance that binds instincts, desires and existences.
The rose, in this imagery, is the symbol of spiritual rebirth. It has the transformative and self-reflective power to bring back awareness and self-love, allowing the protagonist to resent himself in his own uniqueness and at the same time part of the whole.
SCIGHERA
BY MATTEO BITTANTE
with BARBARA ALLEGREZZA, NICOLO' CASTAGNI, SOFIA MAGNANI, MATTEO BITTANTE
COSTUMES | TOM REBL
PRODUCTION DANCEHAUSpiù - new production 2022 (2 to 6 performers)
duration 20'
Versione con 4 performers
Versione con 2 performers
Scighera, it enters lives, squares, courtyards, bathes bodies, pervades with its elusive designs the fears, the imagination of all.
This is what the Milanese call the thick fog that during the winter months hides and conceals the landscape of the Val Padana.
A fog that takes possession of the city, blurring its distances, mixing the real with desire, the past with the future, becoming the envelope of blurred, vague and fleeting images. Images that dissipate in a constantly changing and transforming landscape between what is silenced and what is shown.
For the first time Matteo Bittante approaches the creation of a performance by treating it as a living organism.
An organism in which different performances coexist, allowing themselves to be revealed, discovered and decomposed by the material and imaginary veil of fog.
A fog that becomes the curtain and catalyst of light on changing performances in accordance with the choreographic choices and the environment that in real time will welcome them. Each choreographic fragment will have a varying number of dancers, from two to six performers, and will unveil from time to time different looks at themes that are spokesmen for contemporary issues and clichés representing a thought that changes, decomposes and shows itself for what it is or is not.
LITANIA
BY MATTEO BITTANTE
with Davide Salvadori, Nicolò Castagni, Andrea Piras, Ilaria Malin
PRODUCTION DANCEHAUSpiù - production 2022
Project included in the nextlaboratoriodelleidee.it platform, promoted by
A cry of a generation to man encroaching on the natural territory where the soul resides.
What emerges is a body that transcends toward community and collective harmony, to strive, but above all to live.
Litania is a performance in which two different entities live in opposition: on the one hand, the analytical and rational action that drives man toward the machinic form of things; and on the other, the emotional and sensitive drive of instinct.
In an encounter and struggle for supremacy, or surrender, a balance of the two sides is accomplished, in favor of a survival that does not elevate the victims but praises the perpetrators.
24,42
Vegliate dunque
BY MATTEO BITTANTE
with DANCEHAUS COMPANY
COSTUMES | TOM REBL
SOUND DESIGN & MIX | CHRIS COSTA
PRODUCTION DANCEHAUSpiù
with the support of:
Ph Sara Meliti
A soul, torn to pieces, dresses itself in memory and looks back at the ages of its life: the time of unconsciousness, the gold of dreams, the baroque chatter of intentions, good intentions. He sees a dancing self re-emerge, the struggle of the many selves agitated and confused by the thrill of domination, attracted by power. In the heart of a tale that refuses words, the biography of mute, unchanging pain emerges: the unjust martyrdom of an absurdly sacrificial victim, observed in the light of memory stripped of judgement. 24:42 is the reflection of this gaze: the man who reflects himself by contemplating his wounds, no longer fears or condemns himself. Instead, as in a dawn, he leads himself by the hand towards the breath of play, in a free run on the tracks of a recurring step, in the sweetness oozing from a living rebirth, unexpected, and yet so awaited.
Matteo Bittante sinks the roots of his research into the abysses of an eternal conflict: that between victim and executioner. Not with his gaze turned outwards, outside, but consciously drawn into the meanders of human nature. He represents its traits by painting two frescoes, two acts, two visions. In the first, two young men frolic in the tanning sun of unconsciousness, savouring the taste of secret, of gossip, discovering the multiform richness of a golden skirt, now ruff, now rosette, now refuge. Then the team comes into being, a group of four that aggregates and governs itself, deludes itself into thinking it dominates its animal side, experiments with the function of its dynamics, determines its dominant logic. And where one dominates, another is dominated. It is the system that forms the scapegoat, legitimises hatred for the designated victim, crime and abuse against the different: the weak, the last, the other.
The victim is chosen and isolated, stripped of his right to exist: through skilful citations of a secular Eden, a new Saint Sebastian is struck by the darts of modern abuse and the sacrifice is accomplished. But in the tragic epilogue, the light preludes to the second, dramatic, luminous vision.
24, 42 are two even numbers. Palindrome figures that rise to symbolism, they represent two cycles: one begins, rises, the other reaches, declines and ends. They are youth and maturity meeting in the deep skies of awareness, the student and the master, Icarus and Daedalus, fury and calm, flight and embrace. If one ascends and collides with gratuitous pain, the other understands and with firm resolve, repairs. The two men are not strangers to each other, they are parts of the same harmonic whole: they embark on a journey that will lead the first to full maturity, the second to the acceptance of a new phase of self, invigorated by a resilient sap, both caught up in the perpetual vortex of change. In it nothing is lost, everything shines with a renewed energy, to be cherished and passed on, never to die again.
words by Laura Massari
REPERTOIRE
OVER UNDER
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DI MATTEO BITTANTE
con DANCEHAUS COMPANY
COSTUMI | TOM REBL
PRODUZIONE DANCEHAUSpiù
Over under è stato concepito durante la pandemia “gli artisti non potevano entrare in contatto fisico”. Tali restrizioni hanno limitato fortemente il lavoro creativo. Oggi, il coreografo residente del Centro Nazionale di Produzione della Danza DANCEHAUSpiù Matteo Bittante, rielabora la creazione con maggiore libertà compositiva, tornando su quei temi: la nascita, la trasformazione, il sogno. Ripartendo dal tema della Foglia, ha scelto di far giocare i suoi interpreti con gli oggetti in scena, mescolando significati e significanti.
La foglia, infatti, è un perfetto simbolo di trasformazione, la sua forma si evolve, raccontando storie che si intrecciano nei segni lasciati dal tempo e dalle circostanze.
Nel suo primo stadio è un piccolo germoglio, fragile e suscettibile, proprio come un corpo che porta in sé il potenziale di divenire, e la crescita è un tempo tutto da scoprire.
La foglia si espande, raggiunge la sua pienezza e il corpo racconta un viaggio che si snoda tra sogni e incubi, tra momenti di gioia e altri di sofferenze, andando verso il proprio destino con lo sguardo aperto di chi ha vissuto pienamente.
I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD
BY MATTEO BITTANTE
with DANCEHAUS COMPANY | Alice Carrino, Cristian Cucco, Giovanni Leone
MUSICS | VARIOUS AUTHORS
PRODUCTION | DANCEHAUSpiù
“I wandered lonely as a cloud” is the incipit of one of the most famous poems of English romance written at the beginning of ’800 by William Wordsworth. In this new creation by choreographer Matteo Bittante, co-director and resident artist of the National Dance Production Centre, DANCEHAUSpiù, the poet’s verses form the background to the bucolic rite of the three dancers in which the life force and the idyllic stillness of nature are opposed to the turmoil and confusion of the city. In poetry, as in the show, the real protagonists are not men but the elements of nature such as the lake, the daffodils or the clouds with which the bodies of dancers attempt a possible metamorphosis.
Notes of the choreographer
I lived my childhood on a hill, in the middle of nature, running from one meadow to another; Climbing on trees, I was always in constant contact, almost symbiotic with her. Since antiquity the countryside, and rural life have served as a source of inspiration to many artists. An idyllic place of escape, a refuge from the shops of life, once for the exploration of the self. A landscape of the soul, today to be defended and protected against the ideologies of a period that contaminate and desert Mother Earth.
-Matteo Bittante
ANATOMY OF INSPIRATION
BY MATTEO BITTANTE
with DANCEHAUS COMPANY | Matteo Bittante, Alice Carrino, Cristian Cucco, Giovanni Leone, Fabio Calvisi
MUSIC | CHRIS COSTA
COSTUMES | TOM REBL
PRODUCTION DANCEHAUSpiù
“Anatomy of Inspiration” comes from the multiple creative collaboration of the choreographer Matteo Bittante with the multi-instrumentalist singer and composer, Chris Costa and with the german rock-styled designer, Tom Rebl. Through the succession of the ten scenes that make up the show, the audience is led to reflect on the condition in which each individual lives within society, and on the relationship that art has with the power.
Power and Art, a combination that is sometimes imperceptible, an underground bond, yet rooted for centuries. Paraphrasing Dostoevsky’s famous statement “beauty will save the word” we know that, unfortunately, beauty has failed to save the word.
The hypercommodification, the spectacularization without precedents, associated with hypercommunication have upset and distorted the profound meaning of art and of experiencing art, whose expressive truth requires measure, rhythm, formal quality...
On stage the dancers, who accompany the choreographer, answer with their body to a drawing of styles and original sounds that range from electronic to rap, taking the viewer in a hypnotic whirl of strong and energetic suggestion and rhythms. In search of inspiration, in search of a saving beauty, even if just temporary.
AZIONI SITES PECIFIC
ARTISTIC DIRECTION I MATTEO BITTANTE
with DANCEHAUS COMPANY
MUSIC | VARIOUS AUTHORS
COSTUMES | TOM REBL
PRODUCTION | DANCEHAUSpiù
DANCEHAUSpiù proposes original site-specific performative paths within architectural spaces, museums, prestigious palaces, or magical places. Making use of artists of different backgrounds, through their gesture, the 'encounter between tradition, classicism and contemporaneity takes place.
INSIDE
BY MATTEO BITTANTE
with DANCEHAUS COMPANY
COSTUMES | TOM REBL
MUSIC CONSULTING | CHRIS COSTA and M. ALESSANDRO LUPO PASINI
PRODUCTION ASSOCIAZIONE ContART/ ArtedanzaE20 with the contribution of Next 2015
“Inside” is the story of a universe wounded by the violence of men the uncontrollable fury of Mother Nature. A genesis of the human race, from its first steps on the earth to the evo- lution in the modern individual. Music accompanies this development in any phase with acoustic environments that recall tribal and primordial sounds and that change in the frenetic and destructive rhythm of contemporary tecno music. The origin of the world begins with the tumults of the earth, the birth of the mountains, represented by installations made up of tubes and video projections. The tubes represent “the hand” of the man, they are everywhere, from the city to the boundaries of forests... it is the trail of mankind.
Still governed by animal instincts, men gather in the first tribes and experience gestures, habits and rituals. With the beginning of social dynamics, the struggle for the affirmation of authority, at the expense of the freedoms of others, quickly arises.
The thirst for power ghost the course of history, till nowadays. The modern individual has no other way out of the infernal existence that he leads. He can only follow its frenetic rhy- thm, without the possibility of salvation. The only winner of this eternal cycle of suffering seems to be Mother Nature, able to breathe new life into the world and give hope to a lost human race.
BROTHERHOOD
DUET BY MATTEO BITTANTE
with DANCEHAUS COMPANY | GIOVANNI LEONE - FABIO CALVISI
COSTUMES | TOM REBL
MUSICS | VARIOUS AUTHORS
duration 15'
PRODUCTION DANCEHAUSpiù
Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow,
don’t walk behind me,
I may not lead,
walk beside me and be my friend.
Albert Camus
Two men, maybe two strangers, maybe brothers, maybe friends, maybe lovers. A two-way game in which the body of one draws on the body of the other the incipit of a new direction, of new gestures, of new rhythms. It is an invitation to unite fraternally, to walk together to find oneself hand in hand, no longer only “my”, no longer only “yours”, but relentlessly “one”.