Alessandro Schiattarella and Johanna Heusser
Photo: Kihako Narisawa
Alessandro Schiattarella was born in Naples in 1982. He graduated from the Rudra Béjart in Lausanne. In 2016, he completed his degree in Dance Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy and History at the University of Bern. He has been studying for a master's in fine arts at the FHNW Basel since 2018. He has worked as a dancer with Maurice Béjart, Marco Goecke, Koen Augustijnen and Haris Pašović, among others. In 2014, he created his first dance solo "Altrove", which was selected for a performance by the renowned international platform Aerowaves Twenty17. Since 1996, he has suffered from the rare Hirayama disease, which has led him to develop choreographic projects in the field of disability since 2015 and, more recently, on the theme of masculinity. His work has been shown in major theatres, art venues and festivals. Since 2016, he has been supported by the Swiss cultural foundation Pro Helvetia, organizing seminars, workshops and projects between Switzerland and other countries. In 2020, he began a collaboration with Ingo Niermann and developed "Army of Love" with him, an initiative by the writer, which they presented together at the Neumarkt Theatre in Zurich in February 2020.
Photo: Hitzygraphy
Johanna Heusser is a dancer, choreographer and dance teacher from Basel. She studied contemporary and urban stage dance in Zurich and has danced in various companies and projects in Switzerland, Germany, India, Greece and Uganda. She was the winner of the Atelier Mondial Scholarship in 2018 and has been creating her own pieces since 2016, which can be seen at various festivals in Switzerland and Europe. Her work can be located at the interface between theatre and dance. Johanna Heusser is interested in complex themes such as the cultural appropriation of body-centred practices or the question of how neoliberal ideas influence her Western-influenced body.
Project
During the Double Mentorship, Johanna wants to explore the topic of to-do lists, a phenomenon of a society that can never get everything done and strives to optimize itself. She asks herself questions about how neoliberal thinking influences and controls her body, how she deals with the things she will never get done, what a political body is, or what the counterpart of to-dos is. A solo work about small and big failures and one's own integrated control mechanisms. Johanna Heusser and Alessandro Schiattarella see the Double mentoring as a place of exchange, as support in the creative process and as a mirror of thought. Through small tasks or tools, they get to know each other's working methods better.
