Wednesday 2 May 2018

Art Of Motion

Mari Lon during her live dance performance as a part of the project ''Art of Motion'', 19th May 2018 Photo@Studio Ana D'Apuzzo



We are happy to invite you to join us under the magic hill’s shadow of Monte Verità, to celebrate the fusion of arts. We are honoured to be continuing this wonderful story that started 120 years ago.

“The Art of Motion” is a collaborative event featuring light which generates movement and space and speaks about endless mind and creation. The audience will be welcomed by the London dancer Mari Lon who will open the dance-inspired art exhibition with her modern dance light-bathed performance on stage. The light will be the protagonist that runs through the event, making a dialogue between the art of dance and impressionistic paintings.

Monte Verità: "The place where our minds can reach up to the heavens..."
From the 1900s, Monte Verità, above Ascona, became a pole of attraction for free spirits and creative people from all the world, seeking the ‘'free'' life connected with nature.

Their social organisation based on the co-operative system and through which they strove to achieve the emancipation of women, self-criticism, new ways of cultivating the mind and spirit and the unity of body and soul.






The revolutionary ideals emerging from this community, quickly started to spread across Europe and overseas. This unique place became over the years a sanctuary often visited by many famous people along with a non-conformist crowd: nudists, feminists, philosophers, theosophists, anarchists, followed by writers, poets and artists such as August Bebel, Lenin, Trotzki, Hugo Ball, Hans Arp, Marianne von Werefkin, El Lissitzky, Paul Klee, Carl Jung, Herman Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman, Isadora Duncan and many others.

In his book Mountain of Truth, the historian Martin Green describes Ascona as “a nature-cure resort; an artist’s quarter; an international centre of anarchism; a source of Dada; and the home of Modern Dance.”

In 1913 in Ascona, Rudolf Laban invented and established the first world modern dance school. This experimental dance school was attached to Monte Verità, a picturesque vegetarian sanctuary that offered nature cures as Laban would call them “light and air baths”. Laban and his group pioneered dance based on the liberated body with the power to experience and show a single, great, supreme emotion: ecstasy. Ecstasy was seen as a tool to shatter middle class conventions, to return the alienated, mechanised modern subject back into harmony with the body, nature, and the unconscious rhythm of life. It was at Ascona that Laban first experimented with dance notation that he is now famous for. He studied the modern dance along with great dancers of that time, Mary Wigman, Isadora Duncan and Maga Magazinovic. His student, Maga Magazinovic established the first modern dance school in Belgrade and was the first woman that graduated at university at that time.



Creative sisters - Mari Lon & Ana D'Apuzzo, Photo@Studio Ana D'Apuzzo
Charlotte Bara, Duncan’s student, was an artist of faith based in Ascona who founded the theatre San Materno. She was in continuous search for spirituality, which she represented in all her appearances on stage. The hands are a recurrent theme of every dance and art, as she herself said, "We breathe the world through our hands, they translate the subtlest thought to unite the body and the spirit." For her every movement must “send its vibrations up to the sky and become part of the eternal rhythm.” 



Ascona, Switzerland, May 2018 Photo@Studio Ana D'Apuzzo


Art exhibition has 28 paintings painted by Ana D’Apuzzo made in original oil on canvas technique inspired with dance and Monte Verità story.


Lugano Ascona - Locarno Activities Group 
Culture and Entratement
Title: Art of Motion: dance and exhibition
Time: Saturday, 19 May From 19:00 - 21:00 
Place: Citta Vecchia Ascona, Passagio San Pietro

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