Through a packed programme of productions, education and participation, Artistic Director Paolo Mangiola reveals: 

It also marks the beginning of ŻfinMalta’s journey towards its ten-year anniversary, a time in which Malta’s national dance company has undergone a period of extraordinary growth, drawing recognition at a local and international level. As a result, contemporary dance now has a place at the forefront of Malta’s performing arts scene, with an ever-expanding and dedicated local audience.

The season begins with ‘Aerial’, Mangiola’s new creation for Notte Bianca, a collaboration with the pianist Tricia Dawn Williams and a dialogue between dance and music, seen from an aerial perspective.

In December, ŻfinMalta presents its first Christmas production, with direction and original music performed live by The New Victorians and choreography by Adriano Bolognino. A dance theatre adaptation of the Christmas book Ħolm tal-Milied? by Trevor Zahra, this delightful full family experience takes audiences on a nostalgic ride, juxtaposing classic Maltese traditions with a contemporary musical score and aesthetic.

Kicking off 2024 is ŻfinDays, an annual double-bill featuring two short works.ŻfinMalta is thrilled to present ‘Cantata’ by Mauro Bigonzetti, one of Italy’s pre-eminent dancers and choreographers, a festive homage to Italian culture and to its musical tradition, from lullabies to the pizziche of Salento, with a nod to Neapolitan serenades. ‘Aringa Rossa .10’ by the inimitable Ambra Senatore, director of the National Choreographic Center in Nantes, uses clues, games with changing rules, and fragmented scenes in an encounter with the dancers who eventually take over the choreography.

Returning in March and presented as part of maltabiennale.art 2024, Intimate Żfin is a series of choreographic miniatures created by Paolo Mangiola and performed with Alexandra Alden and her band live in the space. With a focus on the themes of belonging, home and braving the unknown, songs are from Alden’s discography, with preview of her upcoming album.

April sees the return of Dances for Gozo, commissioned by the Ministry for Gozo. This double–bill at the Aurora Theatre features ‘Cantata’ by Mauro Bigonzetti, and ‘Flesh and Stone’ by Canadian choreographer Lesley Telford. Telford explores the echo and enormity of the influence of our mothers through her fascination with the myths of the Ġgantija giants of our past, imagining how the power of those who came before us may seem super-human.

In May, ŻfinMalta joins forces with Ballet D’Jerri, the national dance company of Jersey Island, in ‘Geographers of Solitude’ by Paolo Mangiola. Twenty dancers come together to explore what unites the two islands through distinctive geographical and cultural landscapes, and one extraordinary migratory bird, the Arctic Tern. ‘Voices at the End’ is a double-bill by Paolo Mangiola, presented as part of the Malta International Arts Festival, and the final production in the ZfinMalta season.

Keep reading for our season trailer!

We are proud to be once again working with a number of local creatives, including dramaturg Victor Jacono, paper artist James Dimech, musical artists Tricia Dawn Williams, The New Victorians and Alexandra Aldren, costume designers Louie Noir and Laurent Uyttersprot, set designer Anna Horvath, light designer Dali Aguerbi, and composer Ruben Zahra, to name a few.

In 2023/24 our line-up of education and participation programmes, and online activities continues to make ŻfinMalta a space for artists to develop and take risks, contributing to an open and expansive dance ecology in Malta and internationally, and providing opportunities for aspiring, emerging and established dance professionals to realise their potential and connect with audiences and communities. This season includes open classes, intensives and training for young and professional dance makers, as well as community classes for participants with no previous experience. Open Rehearsals take audiences behind the scenes during the creation process, and Movimento and the Artist in Residence programme continue to demystify contemporary dance and provide a space for the exploration of ideas and new work.

Watch James Vernon’s trailer for Żfinmalta’s Season 2023/24!

 Who are you?

In formal terms, I am a dance artist, a community pharmacist and a public space researcher. In esoteric terms, the fabric of my life is unfolding across many different kinds of threads, stitches, colours, and textures. In posthuman terms, I am a multitude of agents, of animal, earthly, and technological matters, immersed in many complex webs of agents, my body, sticky with stories, politics, labels, is my primary tool for learning, thinking, making, being “human” within these webs.

I am highly sensitive to environments and their human and more-than-human agents, and am perpetually learning how to relate and respond to them softly and openly. With curiosity as my fuel, I venture within the cracks, the inbetweens of things. This is where I feel I can flourish, and where I enjoy inviting others to join me in conversations and creative processes.

How would you describe your practice?

My practice addresses public space through feminist posthumanist perspectives, using body, site, and camera as my main tools. It is feminist as it involves “an affirtmative gesture, a leap of faith in what humans may still be capable of”, and posthumanist as it questions “the dominant idea of the human based on an assumption of superiority by a subject that is white, male, Eurocentric, practising compulsory heterosexuality and repreoduction, able-bodied, urbanized, speaking a standard language” (Braidotti, 2022). With these lenses and tools, I am exploring the boundaries of what it means to be human in the context of public space. Situating my practice in public space means, to me, immersing my body within different sites and allowing performances to emerge, rather than inserting my performance into the site. It involves making myself open to the complex affordances of different sites, allowing for immanence and emergence, while engaging responsively and responsibly.

I landed upon the term “wanderMust” to describe my practice because I feel a sense of urgency to wander so as to learn new ways of relating to my environments. For me, the human body is both subject and object of my practice, both the apparatus for knowledge production and the subject of study. I approach the camera as a posthumanist research tool, a technological extension of my body through which I can communicate what matters to me far beyond the ephemeral moments of performance, through different spaces and times.

How would you describe your relationship to movement?

I often think of movement as a process of matter-ing, involving the mobilisation of materials and enactments of agency (gestures through which the materials are choosing what matters). It is a language – a device for communication, expression, and connection. And most fundamentally, it is a source of joy in my life.

What relationship have you had or do you hope to build with ŻfinMalta?

I’ve had the privilege of being entangled with ŻfinMalta since its establishment in 2014. I was a member of the dance company until 2018, and since then, I have been involved intermittently as a performer, teacher, and rehearsal director. ŻfinMalta continues to be a precious space for me personally, it supports my growth and development as a dance professional. I believe it is also a key institution within the Maltese arts scene.

“ŻfinMalta continues to be a precious space for me personally, it supports my growth and development as a dance professional. I believe it is also a key institution within the Maltese arts scene.”

Has your work ever crossed paths/collaborated with dance? 

I will address this question slightly differently. I do not consider my work as dance in the traditional sense. It is what is referred to as site-specific screendance practice, emerging from within a specific site and performed mainly for screen. I use the choreographic sensibility and nuanced orientation to space I have acquired as a dancer to tune my attention towards the movements of bodies within public spaces.

What can we expect from this movimento talk?

This Movimento session will include a brief presentation of my work – an outline of the concepts I am busy with and how I apply them within my practice – and a chance for audiences to try out some exercises for themselves. No prior experience needed, and cameras are welcome!

About Chick-P

The score for Utopia is a very emotional piece, starting with a quiet melody played on the piano, which is later accompanied by an ensemble of varied synth sounds. If I had to choose a word to describe the feeling the piece conveys, I’d say heartbreak. But that’s a personal answer. And I think, depending on the context, each person is going to feel something different, and interpret the music in a different way.

Utopia will be performed at Teatru Manoel for one final night! Don’t miss your chance to experience this beautifully and intricately composed work by award-winning Emanuel Gat.

26/27/28 May

Teatru Manoel

Watch James Vernon’s trailer for ‘Utopia,’  featuring music by Chick-P

On timing…

It all comes down to risk management. Risk management is a by-product of fear, because I could be afraid as a choreographer that it won’t work, and the consequence of that is, I get bad review. The dancers can be afraid that it won’t work, and people will say they are bad dancers. Those are the fears. So when it comes to risk management, we ask, how can we manage that fear. How can we manage all the bad things that could happen?

One way…

…is trying to control everything. So in order to be sure that there will never be a problem, I could put everything on exact cues, I could tell the dancers exactly how to do everything, and I could try to control everything to the maximum…I can make the dancers learn everything by heart, perform it 100 times, and they will know what to do whilst leaving minimum space for error. We can try to execute and replicate a piece perfectly, that’s one way.

Another way…

…is that we try to study something. We learn and understand what makes it work? What makes something not work? What is the reason that sometimes something works, and another time it doesn’t? Once you understand that -or they understand that, as they are the ones on stage- if they have an understanding of how it works, its the safety net. If something goes wrong, they know what went wrong, how it went wrong, and most importantly, how to find a solution. It comes from their understanding.

I would say, I don’t choreograph, I’m like a coach. If I had Messi playing for me, I’m not going to tell him how to run, or how to kick a ball, because he knows better than the coach how to do that, but he needs someone to organise the team, the placement, and the strategy, in order for him to do what he does well. Dancers do what they do very well, they just need to be given the responsibility and the freedom. They need to understand the choreographic context and process, so they can make a right decision. 

Sometimes it doesn’t work…but its part of the risk I’m willing to take, when it works, it really works, and in a way that is far more interesting than when I am trying to control every aspect. When I decide everything as a choreographer, it creates a very small space. It’s a very limited space where only one thing can happen. Here? Everything can happen.

On dramaturgy…

There’s always a performative aspect. We are trained as dancers to rehearse, and then we perform and end up doing something else, whereas if you are in a choreographic context that really demands work, and decision making, what happens is, that in itself creates a performative aspect. It becomes dramatic in a way that is interesting to watch, because they (the dancers) are really doing something, they are not pretending. All the performative, and dramaturgical aspects are another by-product, which does not need to be manufactured. It’s there, because they are really doing something for real. They don’t need to ‘try’ and perform, they just need to be on top of, and aware, of the situation they find themselves in.

Utopia will be performed at Teatru Manoel for three nights! Don’t miss your chance to see this beautifully and intricately composed work by award-winning Emanuel Gat.

26/27/28 May

Teatru Manoel

Watch James Vernon’s trailer for ‘Utopia’ 

Who are ‘Young Progressive Beings?’

YPB is a youth feminist organisation that seeks to mobilise youth on topics related to intersectional feminism. The organisation was started after a stunt at the EU summit in 2019, and has been active since as part of the Malta Pro-Choice Coalition group. Since its inception, YPB has collaborated with multiple NGOs, mainly Graffitti, Women Rights Foundation, Dance Beyond Borders, Friends of the Earth Malta and MGRM.

What kind of work do you do as an organisation?

Since 2019, YPB has employed grassroots techniques to nurture a space for informed discussions and the expression of anger and frustration, through public stunts and marches. We seek to raise awareness on Gender-based Violence, restrictive reproductive rights laws, the criminalisation of abortion, the lack of sex education, and Eco Feminism. In order to advocate for this, we hold spaces for conversation, both within our audience group by creating safe spaces for people, especially youths to come to us, and outside of this, by being present in public places, like Law Courts and Parliament and educational entities like the University of Malta.

Who will be leading your movimento session on 20th April?

The Movimento session will be led by founding members Rachelle Deguara and Francesca Zammit. Rachelle Deguara is a performance artist, currently studying performance art at MCAST, and Francesca is a filmmaker currently working in the film industry.

How would you describe your relationship to movement?

As an organisation, we often take political stances in public spaces through movement and voice.  Movement is a tool to occupy space and deliver our message. Movement gives us the capacity to organise ourselves. Movement allows us to use choreographic tools like, unison, tempo and our physical presence to occupy space and disrupt the streets.

Has your work ever crossed paths/collaborated with dance?

In 2020, YPB organised an Active Citizenship Webinar around the topic of dance, and hosted a talk by Zoe Camilleri and Dance Beyond Borders about their recent productions as part of Żfinmade.

What 3 words or verbs can sum up your upcoming session?/ What can we expect from this movimento talk?

Movement as noun & verb.

An insight on how local activist group YPB  mobilise the community through movement.

Book your seats now for ŻfinMalta’s movimento with Young Progressive Beings!

 Tell us about yourself

I’m an artist, practice-based researcher and educator based in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  I teach interactive media and audio production and supervise research projects in immersive media and sound art.

How would you describe your practice?

I create work with live performance and mediated performance using digital media.  I am particularly interested in making connections between voice, body and place.

What attracted you to the field of digital media/technology in live performance?

I have always been interested in creating work with technologies available at hand and finding intersections between emerging technologies and mainstream products.  I love to experiment and find mini hacks to use consumer technologies in different ways so as techniques such as 360 video and 3D scanning have become more accessible I’ve started to explore how they can be wrangled to create work with participants.

Has your practice ever crossed paths or collaborated with dance?

My current project ‘Pathways’ is a collaboration with dance artist Paula Guzzanti based at University of Malta.  I love working with a collaborator from the field of dance because it really widens my perspective on visual aspects of the work.

How would you describe your relationship to movement?

My typical considerations with movement within my own work typically relate to site-specificity – planting performances and digital artefacts onto real-world spaces and inviting audiences to explore these through the act of walking.  

What are you planning to share with us on the 28^th March?

What 3 verbs could describe your planned movimento session?

LOTS OF FISHEYE!

Book your seats now for John D’Arcy’s movimento!

 Who are you?

I tend to approach questions about myself with trepidation, but it might be most useful in this case to present by way of an answer my broadest designation at present, namely that of arts and culture editor at the Times of Malta. Ambrose Bierce wrote in his Devil’s Dictionary that an editor is “a severely virtuous censor, but so charitable withal that [s]he tolerates the virtues of others and the vices of [her]self”. My vices tend to surface more prominently when I wear the hat of a writer than that of an editor.

Most of what I write (and sees the light of day) is within the context of my job, which involves writing feature articles, reviews on all manner of productions across artistic genres and conducting interviews for The Sunday Times of Malta culture section. I spend my workdays waging war against time and the trappings of perfectionism. The longest and most arduous piece of writing I have produced to date is my master’s dissertation in philosophy, in which I wrote some 60,000 words on the preposition ‘with’.

What is your relationship with ŻfinMalta National Dance Company?

I first encountered ŻfinMalta through an interview I conducted with choreographer Tânia Carvalho about her work of contemporary dance Weaving Chaos, performed by ŻfinMalta at the Manoel Theatre in December 2021. Following the interview, I was invited to attend a production of the dance on the opening night. I remember heading to the Manoel after a day of work not quite sure what to expect. I left the theatre half dazed, half in awe. I have had the pleasure of reviewing several ŻfinMalta productions since then, including Requiem for Juliet by Riccardo Buscarini in May 2022. I had written in that review that “we tend to emerge from ŻfinMalta productions deeply connected with the unspoken parts of ourselves”. I feel this captures my thoughts on the national dance company quite clearly.

What is your relationship to movement?

I believe I become most conscious of movement when it is constrained by difficulty – when a bout of anxiety washes over me and I furrow my brow, for example, or I stiffen my shoulders or clench my jaw. Likewise, I become conscious of movement when the difficulty subsides, and my motions become more fluid and unrestricted. I find that my eye often gets drawn to specific kinds of subtle movement in others – a specific way of holding a paring knife or particular handgestures during the process of articulation. Idiosyncratic movements often draw my attention and tend to draw me closer to the people who make them. Movements of an aesthetic or personal quality are the ones that most intrigue me.  

What attracted you to start writing for dance?

I wonder if I would have ever started writing about dance had I not stumbled upon the work that I do. Of all the art forms, I find dance to be at once the most far removed from me and the most viscerally moving. I often experience dance with astonishment and perplexity, not least due to its utter physicality and deep connection with music. I write about dance with difficulty, but I find contemplation of this art form exceedingly rewarding.  

“I do not presume to present any complete body of knowledge during my upcoming Movimento session, but I do hope that we can squint at the questions that arise from it together in a spirit of curiosity.”

What are you planning to share with us on the 9th March at ŻfinMalta studios?

I was approached with the proposition of discussing movement through the lens of writing. Naturally, I couldn’t help but make this task as difficult for myself as possible. What interests me most about the question is how the concept of writing inhabits the event and practice of choreography, which in its root sense means ‘dance-as-writing’, where the word itself etymologically denotes the actions of dancing (choros) and writing (graphie). I began to wonder upon pondering this question about how writing is employed to capture a dance, whether throughout history with dance notation (take Labanotation for instance, though this was not adopted for common use), or whenever I might write about dance for the paper. It appears that choreography exists at once independently of a performance as the ‘score’ of a dance and concurrently as the dance itself as it is being performed, where it is ‘written’ by the dancers themselves in real time and space. There seems to be resistance to writing in the sphere of dance; the impression is that words tend to escape dance, or that dance exceeds language and cannot be contained by it, where dance is conceived of as non-textual and distinctively organic. A dance is contained not in writing via notation but in dancers’ bodies – a dance is writ in memory and steeped in presence, which is then passed on from the mind and body of one generation of dancer to another. The question of embodiment in dance brings about a distinction between body and subject. “How do we separate the body from a dancing subject?” asks dance theoretician Mark Franko. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” asks W. B. Yeats in his poem Among School Children. “The dancer is not a woman who dances,” says Stéphane Mallarmé, but “a poem disengaged from the whole writing apparatus.” I do not presume to present any complete body of knowledge during my upcoming Movimento session, but I do hope that we can squint at the questions that arise from it together in a spirit of curiosity.  

What do you hope your audience can experience and take away from being a part of your Movimento session?

I hope that my rudimentary reflections will spur some discussion from practitioners on their knowledge of dance and its ‘written’ qualities. I hope that these questions on choreography can open up some avenues of thought among those who hold dance to heart.

On composition…

“All the time, creating is about choices. You just need to constantly make choices, choices, choices. In the way that I work, I give a lot of decision making to the dancers too, I’m very curious to see what people can do when given the opportunity. In the end, for me, the only reason I choose something is because it feels right, the tension is just right.”

On experiencing dance works…

“People watch dance and they think they need to understand it, but actually, they just need to feel it. They have such a focus or frustration on the fact that they must understand it, that they can’t, and they miss it. When people try too hard at something, they have no chance of succeeding, and dance works are meant to just be experienced, to move you, to be felt.”

On musical choices in ‘Girls and Boys’…

“Most of the songs I used were just songs that accompanied me from my youth, not necessarily specific to the concept of the work. I’m always looking for a sound that brings a specific tension between all the elements on stage, something that brings everything together, something that creates a tension that is just right. Whenever I have more material, I will always go back and question my decisions, does it still make sense? Adding songs and music to movement is just a game, for example in this process we tried many things, but when I chose ‘The end of the World,’ it just felt stronger.”

Girls and Boys will be performed at Valletta Campus Theatre for two nights only! Roy Assaf’s critically acclaimed work ‘Girls and Boys’ is sure to leave audiences deeply moved.

Five boys and five girls fill the stage with striking imagery, unexpected interactions, and small gestures. There is a playfulness, interrupted with sudden moments of powerful and more serious revelations, ‘the expectations of society sitting invisibly, mightily, inescapably upon their shoulders.’ An undoubtedly thought-provoking and charming piece, Girls and Boys is not to be missed.

Watch James Vernon’s trailer for ‘ŻfinDays.’ Paolo Mangiola’s ‘Nuova Figura’ features as part of our ŻfinDays double bill.

“With this performance, I wanted to create the right conditions for both dancers and spectators to experience a condition of tiredness: on the one hand it is the tiredness of bodies, on the other the tiredness of gazes.”

What questions does this work aim to evoke from its spectators?

“The questions we silently address to the spectators are these: how do you form your expectations around a dancer’s body? How many movements, and what speed and virtuosity do you need to see them performed at, to feel fulfilled as a spectator? When you get tired of seeing what is in front of you, where does your gaze rest? What do you really want to see?”

What are some of the concepts behind ‘OKOKOK?’

“In ‘Essay on tiredness’ from 1989, Peter Handke tries to describe tiredness as a high and intense experience of living, a moment of abandonment that leads to a kind of contemplation. Tiredness for Handke is the moment when we stop wanting to see all the details, and stop striving to grasp everything. We remove ourselves from the action, and at that very moment, the world comes towards us, gently. With this performance, I wanted to create the right conditions for both dancers and spectators to experience a condition of tiredness: on the one hand it is the tiredness of bodies, on the other the tiredness of gazes.”

The practices shared with us during the open rehearsal are not presented as such in the final piece, but as Marco explained, these practices allow the dancers to step back, and retrace the creation process. They allow the dancers as performers, to place themselves in front of an audience, “always in a new condition of ignorance, of discovery, of not knowing.”

1. The triangle practice & the Bench:

The dancers entered the space one at at time, and stood in stillness, attempting this concept of ‘doing nothing,’ which as an audience we later reflected on is an impossible task.

“At the beginning of the process, we tried to hypothesise a type of presence for this work, and we did this through the practice of the triangle. A body on stage receives information from three different bodies: its own, that of its companions, and that of the spectators. The practice asks the mover to enter the stage, stand in front of the audience and do nothing.”

“Triangle practice cannot generate a meditative state; on the contrary, if we place the body in the presence of all the information in the world, the state of presence, and therefore of the body, can only be electric. Since it is impossible to do nothing, it is a matter of tuning ever-changing openings to the range of possibilities we allow our bodies to follow.”

2. The chain practice:

Some of the dancers demonstrated for us a segment of physical movement material which makes up the work: a constantly moving phrase filled with familiar movement references. Throughout, the dancers maintain a constant and intense eye-contact with their audience members, making us question our role as spectators, and how we interact with action in front of us.

“The central part of the work, which is meant to produce the double state of tiredness, is based on a long and uninterrupted chain of movements, all inspired by real forms of entertainment from the 20th century to the present day. The body hypothesis that we wanted to test is that of a body that is efficient to the utmost of its capabilities but in which there is a friction with the plane of the gaze, which instead delivers itself with fragility to the audience.”

3. the fossils practice

The last section of the work was created from this practice, in which Marco gave the dancers the following instructions:

“The land is a place where all that has been rests, beneath metres of soft earth. The air of the land still holds memory, invisible, of the movement of the world. You are the archaeologists – diviners of memory – on a quest to save what is left. Simultaneously, you are the ‘finds’, the objects unearthed by the archaeologists. Test the possibility of this double posture starting from a position of total abandon. Let the tiredness and the memory of these days penetrate you.”

Remember: the archaeologist scours the land with his own step.

Remember: a fossil is always a way to invent the future.

Remember: memory follows unexpected routes.

“The central part of the work is meant to produce the double state of tiredness, and is based on a long and uninterrupted chain of movements, all inspired by real forms of entertainment from the 20th century to the present day.”

How have the dancers embodied these practices in the work? 

“The questions that vibrate behind the tireless choreography and that I have invited the dancers to hold in their chests are these: what is behind the absurdity of all movements in the world, and especially movements that are created to please? What thoughts move a body that dances uninterruptedly, and which of these can emerge on our face?”

OKOKOK forms part of our ŻfinDays double bill, which you can catch at Valletta Campus Theatre, on the 17th and 24th February 2023

‘OKOKOK’ is supported by @iiclavalletta (Istituto Italiano Di Cultura) and co-produced with @_van_ity (Associazione Culturale VAN)

Watch James Vernon’s trailer for ‘ŻfinDays.’ Paolo Mangiola’s ‘Nuova Figura’ features as part of our ŻfinDays double bill.