Aristide Rontini

Aristide Rontini  is a choreographer, performer and community dance artist.
He graduated at Codarts – Rotterdam Dance Academy.
His works have been presented in  festivals and theatres in Italy and abroad, such as Oriente Occidente, ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro, Holland Dance Festival among others.
He has been committed works by dance companies Introdans and Skånes Dansteater.
He is Aerowaves Twenty25 artist with his solo Lampyris Noctiluca.
He is an associated artist at the italian dance company Nexus Factory.
Rontini is a disabled art professional. Over the years, he has been involved in projects and conversations around access and disability culture in the performing sector.
As Community dance artist, he has been meeting non-professional communities in workshops and performance activities for more than a decade.
As a freelance dancer, he performed in works by Micheal Schumacher, Georgh Reischl, Simona Bertozzi, Candoco Dance Company, Alessandro Schiattarella, Michela Lucenti, Angelica Liddell, Carl Olof Berg, Vahan Badalyan e Diego Tortelli.

Artistic Practice

In his artistic research, Aristide Rontini focuses on the relationship between body and identity. The work on images, fragmentation and multiplicity are at the center of his choreographic language.

Aristide says about his work:

«I am interested in the body as a living archive of autobiographical traces and socio-cultural signs, and in dance in its power to activate critical, transformative and imaginative processes to give life to more real narratives than the dominant ones.»

«I work around the concept of “Embodied Image”: dancing bodies are thresholds that give life to images and inner states.»

«In my performances I like creating intimate and meditative atmospheres to foster empathic relationship, deeper listening between the audience and the dancing bodies, and to foster the evocation of images form the collective unconsciuosness and the slow dissemination of new images in it.»

«Identity is a central theme in my research. I investigate it to restore its four-dimensionality in a plural, situated, situational, relational, evolving perspective, crossed by contradictions and an inextinguishable dose of mystery.»

Here is the link to his portfolio

LAMPYRIS NOCTILUCA

Description: Inspired by the symbolism of the fireflies of poet Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rontini embodies an experience that invites the audience to an emotional and intimate
contact with oneself.

Extra information: To the looming and objectifying stereotypes related to his own disabled body, Lampyris Noctiluca responds through a sensual dance. The body meets the friction between inside and outside, letting it surface on the skin, which becomes a sensitive emotional screen. The set design, an essential golden icon, camps floating on the stage and accompanies, like an enigmatic gaze, the audience’s sensory experience on a journey of poetic proliferation that places the performer’s body outside of a univocal possible reading.

Credits:
Conception, choreography, performance: Aristide Rontini
Live music and sound design: Vittorio Giampietro
Dramaturg: Gaia Clotilde Chernetich
Light design: Giulia Pastore
Scenography and costume: Aristide Rontini
Light Technician: Angelo Generali
Production: Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT / Teatro Nazionale - Focus CARNE and Associazione Culturale Nexus - Aps
With the support of: Versiliadanza, Onassis AiR as part of the Europe Beyond Access
Co-funded by: the Creative Europe programme, Artistic Residencies Project 2022/2023 Area Cultura - Comune di Imola, Masque Teatro, MiC - DIREZIONE GENERALE SPETTACOLO for Oriente Occidente's RIFRAZIONI project, APS Arcigay Il Cassero / Gender Bender, Centro Servizi Culturali Santa Chiara, APS Fuori Luogo (Festival Fisiko!), IAC - Centro Arti Integrate, Menhir/Le Danzatrici en plein air, TeatroMenzati/Tex the ExFadda theater.
With the contribution of the Ministry of Culture, Emilia-Romagna Region, Municipality of Bologna.

A short version of 25’ is available.
Accessibility: Audio-description is available for blind and visually impaired audience.

Lampyris Noctiluca is also part of the triptych Frammenti di Infinito and can be presented in diptychs:
Lampyris Noctiluca (long) + Corporale (55’)
Lampyris Noctiluca (short) + Corporale (40’)
Lampyris Noctiluca (short)+ Back Eye Black (40’)

For more info about modular possibilities of Frammenti di Infinito contact the company.

BACK EYE BLACK

Description: Back Eye Black is both dream and nightmare, delight and damnation. The performance focuses on the moment when the fireflies’ inner glow fades.

Extra information: Dancing, the performers oscillate between connection and dissolution, attraction and repulsion. They are castaways from relationships, intermittent souls succumbing to the light of contemporaneity that here pervades the stage in all its homogenizing power. The audience is as if looking from the back part of the author’s eyes, which point straight to the heart of his
unconscious.

Credits :
Title: Back Eye Black
by Aristide Rontini
with Silvia Brazzale, Orlando Izzo, Aristide Rontini
Dramaturg: Gaia Clotilde Chernetich
Sound Designer: Vittorio Giampietro
Costume Designer: Orlando Izzo
Production: Ass. Cult. Nexus - APS
Co-production: Crisalide Festival
With the support of Progetto Residenze Artistiche 2022/2023 Area Cultura Comune di Imola
With the support of Danza Urbana - Rete h(abita)t / MUVet and Northern School of Contemporary Dance
“This project was supported by Open Dialogo, a bilateral cultural exchange project managed by Stopgap Dance Company and commissioned by Arts Council England, the Italian Ministry of Culture (The Performing Arts department), the Italian Cultural Institute of London and the British Council.”
With the contribution of the Ministry of Culture, Emilia-Romagna Region, Municipality of Bologna.

Back Eye Black is also part of the tryptic Frammenti di Infinito and can be presented in diptychs:
Back Eye Black + Corporale (40’)
Lampyris Noctiluca (short) + Corporale (40’)
Lampyris Noctiluca (full) + Back Eye Black (65’)

For more info about modular possibilities of Frammenti di Infinito contact the company.

CORPORALE - Community Dance Project

Description: Corporale is a choral action dedicated and designed for non-professionals. The performance brings to life each time a new temporary community of people coming from the local territory.

Extra information: On stage, participants are invited to embody a poetics focused on mutual listening, the care of presence and the essential nature of the gesture. In the shared space and time of the theatre, the community manifests itself by releasing its capacity for transformation through the powerful instrument of dance.

Credits :
Concept and choreography: Aristide Rontini
With the participation of people from local communities
Dramaturg: Gaia Clotilde Chernetich
Sound design: Vittorio Giampietro
Lighting design: Angelo Generali
Production collaboration: Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT / Teatro Nazionale, Oriente Occidente in the project Europe Beyond Access co-financed Creative Europe and Nexus Factory (2024)
With the contribution of Mic, Emilia-Romagna Region, Municipality of Bologna

Corporale is also part of the triptych Frammenti di Infinito and can be presented in diptychs:
Lampyris Noctiluca (long) + Corporale (55’)
Lampyris Noctiluca (short) + Corporale (40’)
Back Eye Black + Corporale (40’)

For more info about modular possibilities of Frammenti di Infinito contact the company.

FRAMMENTI DI INFINITO. TRE ATTI PER LE LUCCIOLE (Fragments of Infinity. Three Acts for the Fireflies)

Description: In this dance triptych, the choreographer explores the theme of the firefly as a symbol of fragility and resistance.

Extra information: In the first act Lampyris Noctiluca, an autobiographical solo, Rontini embodies the sensuality of his own body with disabilities to resist the stereotypical gaze he’s often subjected to by creating an intimate and hypnotic dance. In the hallucinatory second act Back Eye Black, three performers experience the fading of their inner glow that leads them to the wreckage of any attempt at relationship. The last act, Corporale, is a choral action involving non-professionals and forming a temporary community based on listening, caring and freedom of expression. With its presence, the community closes the piece by transforming the scene into a space for sharing and launching an invitation to a profound collective change.

Inspiration: A tryptic dance project, it arises between 2022 and 2024 from the encounter with the image of the firefly, used by poet and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini in his famous The Article of Fireflies (1975). The firefly is a metaphor for the human ability to “illuminate from within”, to get in touch with oneself, one’s body, needs and desires. Its faint glimmers are symbolic of personal truths that escape the grip of objectivity. They are rambling, elusive insights that lend themselves to being contemplated rather than explained. This ability to “illuminate from within” is threatened by our times so marked by the blinding lights of standardization, by hectic times and loneliness. What would happen if the dim glow fades?
How do we individually and collectively resist this threat?

Credits:
Choreography and Direction: Aristide Rontini
With/Silvia Brazzale, Cristian Cucco, Orlando Izzo, Aristide Rontini and with the participation of local communities
Original music: Vittorio Giampietro
Dramaturg: Gaia Clotilde Chernetich
Light design Lampyris Noctiluca: Giulia Pastore
Technique and lighting: Angelo Generali
Care and executive production: Elena De Pascale
Production collaboration: Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT / Teatro Nazionale, Oriente Occidente in the project Europe Beyond Access co-financed Creative Europe and Nexus Factory (2024)
With the contribution of Mic, Emilia-Romagna Region, Municipality of Bologna

The show consists of three acts. They can be presented individually or combined with each other. Beside the triptych form, they can also be presented individually or combined with another in dipthyc form.
- Lampyris Noctiluca (full version 45’)
- Lampyris Noctiluca (short 25’)
- Back Eye Black (25’)
- Corporale – community dance project (15’)
- Triptych Fragments of Infinity (65’): Lampyris Noctiluca short (25’)+ Back Eye Black (25’) + Corporale (15’)

- Lampyris Noctiluca long (45’) + Corporale (15’)
- Lampyris Noctiluca short (25’) + Corporale (15’)
- Lampyris Nociluca short (25’) + Back Eye Black (25’)
- Back Eye Black (25’) + Corporale (duration 15’)

ALEXIS 2.0

Duration: 25 minutes

Description: With her novel published in 1929, "Alexis ou Le traité du vain combat", the french writer Marguerite Yourcenar gave life to a long letter in which the protagonist attempts to declare his homosexuality to his wife.

Extra information: Through the text, I have started my choreographic research that embodies the complex physical and emotional dynamics that can come into play the process of coming out and shows how in the urgency of a declaration in the first person, on the other hand, collective and shared urgencies, that concern in transversal manner the condition and state of being human, can be recognized.

Credits:
Aristide Rontini: Choreographer
Cristian Cucco: Performer
Gaia Clotilde Chernetich: Dramaturg
Vittorio Giampietro: Original music
Simona Bertozzi: Artistic Advisor
Dalila D’amico: Artistic Collaborator
Produced by NEXUS FACTORY
Co-produced Oriente Occidente
With the support of Anticorpi – Rete di Festival e Rassegne e Residenze dell’Emilia-Romagna nell’ambito dell’azione supportER, Fondazione Teatro Comunale Citta’ di Vicenza, Alma Danza di Bologna, Musei Civici di Imola, Altriballetti
With the contribution of the Ministry of Culture, Emilia-Romagna Region, Municipality of Bologna.

Alexis 2.0 can be performed both in site specific location and theatre spaces.

Accessibility: Audio-description is available for blind and visually impaired audience.