Cristiana Casadio (IT/DE)

“I feel like I’m noWhere, even when I’m nowHere, wearing my skin and walking my dream on a leash, while the chair becomes the house of a snail and my plant cleans my thoughts.”

We spend a third of our lifetime letting our imaginations reign free – by dreaming. Though as soon as we’re awake, we resist our dreams and filter them, using the filters of logic and efficiency provided by our modern world. As helpful as these filters can be, we thereby reduce our environment to categories and stereotypes, depriving ourselves of infinite perception.

“nowhere” evokes the positive power of dreaming and transports us to a world where everything communicates with anything, where certainties and categories dissolve, where our clarities recede into the far distance. In this illusory place, everyday objects such as a chair, cutlery, a branch, a coat and a houseplant are not what we usually associate them with. The dancer is controlled by them, merges with them. Simultaneously nowhere – and now here – the surrealistic movement collage invites us to dream while awake.

Cristiana Casadio, once an Italian champion in rhythmic gymnastics, studied ballet and contemporary dance. In 2017 she performed together with Stefan Sing in the production “Tangram” in Erlangen. In her new solo, she now wittily brings the illogical nature of dreaming on stage.

“The dancer knots her body, puts it in curious positions. It’s a body from a dream world in which the tried and true methods of locomotion don’t seem to work. A new way of getting around is invented. With magic tricks, flexible body and expressive tension, Cristiana Casadio creates a collage that describes the power of the inner fantasy world.” (tanzschreiber, 2022)