Francesco Vezzoli’s performance Fortuna Desperata opens the Performa 15 biennial with a dramatic illumination of the birth of ballet, exploring the form’s earliest incarnations in the royal courts of the Italian Renaissance.
In collaboration with Dancer David Hallberg, Principal Dancer for the Bolshoi Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, the performance revives and translates ballet’s beginnings and the period’s pageantry for a contemporary audience, bringing the past into dialogue with the present. Drawing on aesthetic principles of order, proportion, perspective and geometry on which Renaissance art, architecture, and design are grounded, the piece is a historic excerpt, a renaissance itself that resuscitates complex moral representations of divinity and the cosmos prevalent during the time.
November 1st, St. Bartholomew’s Church
Performa 15 Opening Night
Role in Production: Associate Producer