Swan is a performance inspired by the solo The Death of the Swan that Michel Fokine choreographed for Anna Pavlova in 1901. This is the starting point for a work that goes beyond the traditional definitions of dance and theatre and uses the practice of sport by putting it to the test on a formal and conceptual level. The scene is an ordinary scene: a young girl on skates is training while listening to music on headphones. As if enclosed in a bubble, she hovers with transportation and obstinacy in elliptical trajectories. Her solipsism is the paradoxical one of sporting exercise, of the exhibited intimacy of the relationship with her own body, her own possibilities and her own limits. Existence as insistence: the action is repeated in increasingly daring figures, becoming a test of resistance, at once physical and existential. The subject is the fall, the wound, the muscular tear of a humanity in flight from itself, narcissistically balancing on its axis in search of a spectrum of identity and affirmation. Swan is indeed a portrait of life in all the tragic banality of a compulsion to repeat. The glimmer of an ever-spring still life. Of existence as a grotesque exercise in death, beyond salvation. All that is left for the spectator to do is to try to glimpse the last breath, his own.
Gaetano Palermo (1998, Catania) is a director, choreographer and multidisciplinary artist. His research lies on the borderline between reality and representation, investigating the ontology of performance in its relationship with the real through the phantasmagorical and the uncanny. After graduating in Philosophy from the University of Bologna, she studied Theatre and Performing Arts at the University luav of Venice and Visual Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kassel. In 2019, she participated in the advanced training course "Il Ritmo Drammatico" at the Societas Institute of Applied Arts. As a performer she has worked for artists such as Bruce Nauman, Romeo Castellucci, El Conde de Torrefiel, Rimini Protokoll, Cesare Pietroiusti, Tamara Cubas. His latest work Swan is the winner of Biennale College Teatro - Site-Specific Performance in 2023.
