Winner of the 2024 international call dedicated to site-specific performances by Biennale College, designed for outdoor settings, dancer and performer Elia Pangaro shares his story in this interview.
Elia Pangaro is the dancer and performer who won the Biennale College bid for site-specific performances. Born in 1997, Pangaro worked with Afshin Varjavandi and INC – InNprogressCollective, and is currently working on sophisticated projects such as Bolide | Deus ex machina, a research on social acceleration as a new form of totalitarianism and on the incessant increase in production and consumption in our world.
Your upcoming piece is shrouded in secrecy. The title Bolide (‘meteor’) seems to allude to celestial bodies, but it might also mean ‘bullet’ or ‘high-performance car’. How did you come up with this title?
I knew from the get-go this was going to be a performance on acceleration and speed, it was the essential concept of my work. Bolide points at the speed aesthetics of the piece. Deus ex machina completes the term, explaining how the cultural acceleration process is a deus that imposes a set of choices on us, however indirectly. The bolide is the character that stands still, accelerating only in potential, and passive viz. the bolide that dart around him, like a motorcycle in the middle of the sea – utterly useless.
Do you see yourself as part of the urban dance trend?
‘Urban’ styles certainly shaped my motions and my way of thinking about motion. They were my first approach to dance, in fact. While my techniques belong to the world of house, popping, tutting, breaking, etc… I don’t fully recognize myself in any of the current urban dance trends. At any rate, all urban styles are rigorous, and as disciplines, they are not that far removed from classical ballet. This is what made me stick with them and keep researching virtuosity in every last detail. What I am currently working on, though, is not purism, but contamination. Contamination between different dance techniques as well as different art fields. A sort of vital interdisciplinarity.
What influenced you in your maturity as an artist and as a person?
Certainly, I have been sheltered from the influence of screen – smartphones and television, as I was growing up. This later turned into a sort of super-exposition, which is one of the main themes in Bolide. I didn’t reflect much on these topics as I was designing the performance, but surely they had some influence on my perspective. Friends who worked on different projects encouraged me to read more, like Hartmut Rosa’s essays on social acceleration. Then I widened the scope of my research and I found interesting points in both modern art currents and mainstream culture. I eventually included it in my work with input from dancer Polina Sonis. The following step was adding sound design, designed and integrated by Robert Lagerman and Federico Tansella. Back to your question, experiences that made me mature are so many I cannot possibly list them. The most important have been the meetings and exchanges with the many people I got to know, and especially the ones I worked with. I am also looking forward to collaborating with other choreographers and directors. Darlingbuds, the collective I’m in, will soon release new videos, installations, and performance projects.
