In 2023 Antonella Usai is part of the artist residency program activated by the MAO.
The three videos within the gallery show a documentation of some performances of the festival DARBAR India in Dance held at MAO in 2014 and curated by Antonella Usai, artist-in-residence for the two-year period 2022-24 within the broader #MAOtempopresente programme.
In an attempt to recreate the original context that has always nurtured ancient Indian choreographic traditions, the videos highlight the relationship between performing arts and visual arts and, more generally, between philosophical thought and body practice.
Classical Indian dance, as the scholar Kapila Vatsyayana clearly underlines, represents a sort of “total art” in which not only theatre and dance converge, but also literature, painting, sculpture and music.
Through the use of the body, performer Sangeeta Isvaran activates a new reading and narration of some of the works in the collection, revisiting ancestral topics, traditions and mythologies in a contemporary perspective.
Watch the videos in the galleries and the presentation video of the project in Italian Sign Language (LIS)
Antonella Usai is a dancer, performer, researcher and dance and yoga teacher. Her main field of research-action is the relationship between art, nature and systemic vision. Initially trained at the Farco-Morra school in Turin, after winning numerous competitions, she began working with Italian and European dance theater companies as a dancer, choreographer and assistant director. Winner of a government scholarship, she graduated with honors from the Darpana Academy of Performing Arts in Ahmedabad in India. After her graduation she continued her training with the most renowned teachers of this discipline becoming, among other things, the first non-Indian dancer engaged by the prestigious Darpana Performing Group, performing all over India and in south east Asia. Starting from her master’s degree in history of theater at the Turin University, she continues to investigate how the perception and role of dance in general and of Indian dance in particular, has changed, with specific references to decolonial thought. She is a member of TRA, the Artistic Research Table of Lavanderia a Vapore, and a consultant artist of Hangar Piemonte.She has collaborated with the MAO since its inauguration as a performer and curator of innovative projects.
Sangeeta Isvaran is one of the most important Bharatanatyam artist, expert in the expressive art of Abhinaya as well as a research scholar and a social activist. She has been awarded with the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar,the highest national award for young dancers. She is founder of the Wind Dancers Trust, working in marginalized, underprivileged communities using the arts in education, empowerment and conflict resolution across 30 countries. She is a Fellow of the International Institute of Conciliation, USA, and an Honorary Associate of the Nature Conservation Foundation, India. She brings through her performances, lectures and workshops a forgotten truth about how we can relate to one another in a real and very honest way.
