Residencies

New York University, Tisch School of the Arts | Dance, March 2024

Karole Armitage | Richard Move | Matteo Stella Dance Arts
Untitled New Work

The fruitful collaboration between choreographer Matteo Levaggi and visual artist/performer Samantha Stella - Sublime Gentleness (Financial Times) -, resulted in the founding of the duo Matteo Stella Dance Arts in 2019, after working together at the Museo Madre in Naples on a project initiated by the Fondazione Donna Regina per le Arti Contemporanee and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation New York. Their next chapter is a work shared with Karole Armitage - The Punk Ballerina (Vanity Fair) - and Richard Move - Best Dance 2021 (The New York Times).

Untitled New Work is divided into three parts: the first movement is signed Karole Armitage. The second movement features the signature and onstage presence of Richard Move, while the third movement is signed and performed by Matteo Stella Dance Arts. The starting point of the new creation is Empty Words, one of John Cage's most incisive works, created in 1974. Seated, John Cage speaks and creates sonorities using phrases, letters and sounds, which fundamentally deconstruct Thoreau's original philosophical text making it almost incomprehensible.

Karole Armitage collaborated with Megan LeCrone, soloist with New York City Ballet, and Lucy Stewart, dancer with Complexions Contemporary Ballet in New York City. The duo performs an uncanny, punk minimalist dance to the music of Tony Conrad. An example of strength, freedom and resilience reminiscent of the perseverance demonstrated by Cage in his 1977 performance of Empty Words at the Teatro Lirico in Milan, continually disrupted by the audience. Included in the scene are the Matteo Stella Dance Arts duo and Richard Move, in a reference to Armitage's historic ballet The Watteau Duets.
Prompted by radical, performative speech and curiosities of Italian politics (from an American perspective), Richard Move created a new performance based on his speech inspired by La Cicciolina’s popular radio show, political speeches, and songs of her recording career. Still politically active, Ilona Staller a.k.a Cicciolina, launched her Democracy, Nature and Love party in 2020, partly to protest pension cuts, including her own. Move is joined by the two dancers Matthew Mancuso and Fernando Trinidad performing to the intense music by Anohni. Again a reference to The Watteau Duets performed directly by Karole Armitage.
The Matteo Stella Dance Arts duo, interested in the state of Art in all its languages, has conveived a performance on the dark sounds of Nico (after her New York experience with The Velvet Underground), the suggestive ambience of Nero Kane and the compositional avant-garde of Luciano Berio. For the study created in New York, the duo is joined by the New York City Ballet Soloist Megan LeCrone in white original Balanchine robes, a symbol of the purity of Art. The deconstruction of the classical dance vocabulary in her movements is a process similar to that applied by John Cage to Thoreau's text in Empty Words. Also, the stillness of the bodies, in apparent antithesis to the moving bodies, recalls the Cagean relationship between silence and sound. Opening the pièce is a cameo by Armitage and Move, who play Stella and Levaggi themselves.