Italian celebration in Cold Spring

Posted 11/13/19

On November 16, Italian multidisciplinary artist Marinella Senatore will engage nearly 100 professional and amateur performers from throughout the Hudson Valley in a monumental procession and …

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Italian celebration in Cold Spring

Posted

On November 16, Italian multidisciplinary artist Marinella Senatore will engage nearly 100 professional and amateur performers from throughout the Hudson Valley in a monumental procession and performative celebration of community.

The performance will begin at 12:30 pm at the Veterans Monument on the lawn of St. Mary-in-the-Highlands in Cold Spring, near the corner of Main Street and Route 9D, and will move down Main Street towards the waterfront, with a grand finale at the Cold Spring Bandstand at 3 pm.

Commissioned by Magazzino Italian Art Foundation, the performance will bring Senatore’s The School of Narrative Dance to the streets of Cold Spring, New York, with three hours of curated performance sequences and spontaneous improvisation. As with Magazzino’s Walking Sculpture performance by Michelangelo Pistoletto in 2017, the performance affirms the institution’s mission to engage the community in its program and provide a platform in the United States for Italian artists working today.

Curated by Ylinka Barotto, Senatore’s performance will invite local performers across creative disciplines—from cheerleaders and marching bands, to classical musicians and choirs, to dancers, athletes, and community activists—to be part of the creation of this site-specific and community-led project. Beginning November 6, additional participants sourced via an open call will convene at Magazzino for movement workshops, led by Senatore along with Nandhan Molinaro and Elisa Zucchetti from Berlin-based dance company Espz, who have worked with The School of Narrative Dance since 2013. The performance will also encourage active participation of its bystanders, who will be invited to move along with the sounds and movements of the performers as the crowd winds through the streets.

Over the last 15 years, Senatore has focused her artistic practice on exploring the creative power of crowds. Her work has facilitated dynamic community collaborations, using models of social organization drawn from the concept of assembly, and has engaged over five million people across the world. The performance in Cold Spring builds upon Senatore’s ongoing project The School of Narrative Dance, a multidisciplinary initiative developed by the artist and distinguished for its focus on emancipation and empowerment through collective and large-scale storytelling. Focused on creating choreography together with participants, The School of Narrative Dance fosters community through process-based and site-specific expression of participants’ narratives and vernacular gestures.

“We are delighted to work with Marinella Senatore, an artist renowned for her ability to foster new connections between people,” said Magazzino Italian Art Foundation Director Vittorio Calabrese. “Serving the people of Cold Spring and the Hudson Valley has always been at the core of our mission, and we are excited to invite the community to partake in a performance with one of the most important Italian figures in the contemporary art world.”

Presented by Magazzino in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute of New York, the performance is organized on the occasion of the group show Non-places and the Spaces in Between at the Italian Cultural Institute. The exhibition, on view from October 17 to December 6, , and curated by Ylinka Barotto with Chiara Mannarino, will feature a new body of work by Senatore among works of other Italian artists to offer a timely and powerful look at participation and resistance in an era of seemingly fungible truths.