Carla Rizzu and Paola Vezzosi
Carla Rizzu and Paola Vezzosi are the joint winners of the 2009 edition of Danz’è, the choreographic competition curated by Oriente Occidente, aimed at promoting young Italian dance. This initiative aligns with the festival's consistent focus on local authors over its thirty-year history. Last year, Rizzu won with Nome di battaglia in collaboration with director Eugenio Sideri. The jury's motivation was: “for the relevance of the theme focused on civic engagement, for the interpretative intensity, the content, and for the composition of the stage layout.” Vezzosi won the joint award in 2009 with the solo Penelope. Canti d’attesa, recognized “for the coherence between the chosen theme and its treatment and the convincing strength of the author-performer.”
The festival co-produces a creation by the Danz’è winners to be presented the following year: Eat 26 for Carla Rizzu and Alter for Paola Vezzosi.
Carla Rizzu, the Void, the Fullness
With her very young company Nervitesi, founded in the spring of 2009, Sardinian dancer and choreographer Carla Rizzu, born in 1975, presents Eat 26 at Oriente Occidente, a duo she performs with Claudia Bosco. The concept, dramaturgy, and direction are co-signed with Eugenio Sideri, director of Lady Godiva Teatro, highlighting Rizzu's fundamental interest in works conceived around the fruitful relationship between genres. Eat 26 is an acronym for Eating Attitude Test, which consists of 26 questions used in the United States as a possible preventive test for anorexia and bulimia nervosa. The choreographer writes:
"Two girls, perhaps strangers, with shining eyes, look out from the window of their room. There’s a bus stop. Empty.
Yet their hearts are full, overflowing, filled with thoughts, moods, and emotions. But the mirror and the scale weigh heavier than that full heart. The emptiness of the bus stop, the wait for a bus that may never arrive, creates a dull noise in their stomachs. It becomes a monster that screams at them when they look at themselves. It becomes an obsessive thought, daily, rigorous almost to the point of becoming mathematical. A precise recipe to learn to accept oneself, to survive life without realizing they are moving toward the end."
Rizzu's training, like that of many Italian performers, has developed through various stages around the world, taking her from Sassari to Rome, and then to New York, Paris, and Brussels. In Bologna, she studied acting at Accademia 96, later working as an actress for the Lady Godiva Teatro company directed by Eugenio Sideri.
