The vertical dance performance site specific is a research project begun in 1995 by choreographer Wanda Moretti and musician and composer Marco Castelli.
It is a unique event which focuses on the use of the performance space in which it is realized. The performance is accompanied by live music to include saxophone, loops and live electronics.
In recent years the company Il Posto has been developing choreographic pieces for vertical spaces, where dancers perform on building facades, bridges, towers, lighthouses, and cloisters, as well as theaters, industrial buildings, caves, and discotheques - in continual transformation much like that of the mythological figure Proteus.
The project is an integration between movement, sound and environment; the relationship between man and space based on the concept that all things are movement.
Through various phases, the Proteo Project has transformed itself into an ever changing creation with a strong self-supporting structure. Along with the choreography and specially composed music, the architectural arrangement plays a fundamental role in the project and gives the event its unique identity.
Indeed the project was founded on the mythological figure of Proteus and on the idea of transformation. The choreographic and spatial structure together with the choice of music and acoustics blend with the performance location. The anthropological, social, cultural and architectural aspects of the space are essential components of the event and constitute the exclusive site of the performance.
In relation to the myth, the performance is based on several different
phases which join sound, space and movement.
It is architecture as theatrical space, par excellence, in the timeworn
notion of “location”; a setting rich in symbols and presence;
a ground analogous and antithetical to contemporary art. It is the space
in which we live - inhabitants of this century who move within an ancient
space.
[Movement is, so to speak, living architecture - living in the sense of changing emplacements as well as changing cohesion. The architecture is created by human movements and is made up of pathways tracing shapes in space...]
Rudolf von Laban, Choreutics