I work with the body, with movement, with presence.
I work with stories, with symbols.
I work with the planets and the Moon, the beautiful Moon that accompanies us in its phases.
I work with sharing and facilitating experiences of profound connection with life itself: enjoying its wonder, mourning its pain, as an active protagonist.
I believe in the revolutionary gesture of awakening to what is alive, vibrant, in the present moment. I believe in Silence that speaks and the Invisible that manifests itself.
I take care of guiding people closer in observe their bodies, to then go further, listening to the hidden messages, to their bodily their stories.
I’m interested in playing with illusory definitions, identities and identifications.
I believe in telling stories that have never been told, I believe in giving space to what has been denied, to what has been silenced: I believe in the free, bold, sacred expression of each of us living beings.
—About me
My story begins with dance. Bharata Natyam, the dance-theater form from South India, was my first great love; this performing art form that is a complete dance-theater-musical entity. I dove into a profound study of technique, discipline, detail: pin picking the intention behind each gesture, the embodiment and the state of presence. I had a unmeasurable passion for music and rhythm, for the essential presence of sound in dance. I would refer to the Mrdangam (percussion instrument) as my Father!
This study was possible thanks to the encounter with great teachers of this art. For the dance in Italy and India with Maresa Moglia, Krishnaveni Laksmanan, Pushpa Shankar, and in England with Stella Uppal, just to name a few. The musical studies in the Carnatic tradition was possible with great teachers such as Seetarama Sharma and K.K. Krishnamurti.
I found myself on stage from a very young age in the company of Maresa Moglia, Mangalam. We extensively toured all over Italy and in London: dance, performance, music, it was pure love.
Over the years I became curious about contemporary dance. I fell in love all over again finding my expressive language in improvisation, in post-modern techniques, Instant Composition and Contact Improvisation.
I relocated in the United States, as undergraduate Dance student at Columbia College Chicago (IL). I was fortunate enough to study with great exponents of post-modern dance practices including Selene Carter, Kathleen Maltese, Mark Koenig, and in the future years too I continued explore improvisation with artists such as Nita Little and Ruth Zaporah. Improvisations has since always been a strangely familiar language for me, branching perhaps from the Eastern philosophy I grew up with: many practices embraced the East with parallels and similarities, although offering different experiences and awareness tools. The west that faces the east with a smile and finds its own expressive language. During my stay in Chicago period I lived in a residence for Female Artists, the Three Arts Club of Chicago. In this safe non-patriarchal space we shared, studied, practiced, live in sisterhood. A community of women and art. What is the meaning of choosing to be a Woman Artist? What does it mean to create art with one’s life, and create life with one’s art? Many questions. At college I studied Philosophy and Comparative Religions, with the numinous Christian-Hindu professor Wayne Teasdale.
In the USA I had the opportunity to dance extensively, I joined the Jam sessions, I followed the Glacier collective with Contact Improvisation, I participated in various performances. I was flowing: not creating barriers to the opportunities that were unfolding in front of me …
I began to feel on / in my skin the weaving effect of Indian Classical Dance and the practice of Improvisation. What should I identify with? Later on in the years, I stopped asking this question… In Chicago I also met Yoga. I met he precision and rigor of Iyengar Yoga. I remember dreading having to sitting still, but at the same time craving to be able to.
Back in Europe, a few years later I finally graduated. I was the first student of the London Contemporary Dance School (UK) to receive a BA (Hons) degree in Contemporary Dance with a specialization in South Asian Dance studies. Fundamental to me was encountering and working with my teacher, powerful artist and choreographer, Stella Uppal, with whom I still now dance with. Stella had an illuminating perspective of India and its art, its poetry and aesthetics. This visceral, exciting beauty, which simultaneously is distilled, crystallized, in the name of a search for the essential. I reflected and practiced on the deep meaning, for the individual and the collective, of Indian dance in the contemporary world. In my breaks between one semester and the next, while in London, I went to study in Chennai, India, with the teachers of the Kalakshestra Academy. Several weeks spent with different amazing dancing personalities like Pushpa Shankar, Janardanan, Chadrashekar.
As a young professional London I danced and collaborated, worked, created, experimented, until I relocated to Mexico. As a guest of the Dance Collective Muuval company I’m enthusiast of all the new encounters, new cultural exposures. After several unexpected events, I stay longer than I should have.
I return to Italy experiencing the most pure and powerful dance of life: motherhood. I was challenging my body, my female side, my independent life as an artist. I was reflecting once again on the theme of what defines me, (who am I?) and what my role is. New ideas and new joys bring me to Siena.
I had a specific craving: using my voice. I challenge myself in the work with the theater, together with Francesco Burroni (AresTeatro company), with Mila Moretti ( TeatrO2). I discover other aspects of this Voice, bubblling potential, playing with sound, rediscovering the love for poetry, for words, for texts. Suddenly I am composing, dances, poems, stories. I immerse myself in jazz music, in danced dialogues, with precious collaborations with music artists as Alessandro Giachero, Mirco Mariottini, and many others.
In the meantime I also gave birth to Spazio Sinfisi Danza, a place for research, studies, while continuing to independently carry out my cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary path. My focus is Dance as a practice, reading the language and the stories of the dancing body. I’m juggling on and off between Indian dance and improvisation, between technical coding and the practice of being reactive and active in the present moment, I am rediscovering and reinventing my own language every single day.
I belong for all means to that generation of dancers and practitioners of the movement, who had the fortune of studying in the East and in the West, to have different sets of keys for reading the body-mind-spirit system. I am devoted to the meaning and value of art, of the body seen as my Temple. I was finding myself with a great baggage of knowledge and a huge threadto unravel. The solution lies in practice; practice, practice, practice. Dance and savor the silence. Meditate. To listen. Skimming each layer, going from the thick experience to the more subtle perception, looking for what is essential.
From the desire for silence, the Universe guided me to Carlos Fièl and his prospective on Yoga. I trained in his school, Sadhana Yoga. For four years I followed the training program to become a Yoga Teacher. A new chapter opened up for me: I was savoring the stillness of meditation, the slowness of conscious research, acceptance. Yoga in some way closes a circle in my research, joins the bridge between Indian dance and contemporary dance.
Yoga practice and philosophy allowed a different access to my work, it allows me to bring people closer to themselves and to experience themselves in parallel with the performance work. I started seeing other human beings with another spirit, I was working with the elderly, with children, with adults in the Tuscan countryside.
I meanwhile continued to actively collaborate with artists, musicians, choreographers. I was constantly eager to find new encounters, new sharing opportunities, transcending the frontiers of the single artistic disciplines and playing with the most varied possibilities of communication. I have never been interested in what makes us different, as beings, what separates us individually, but I do seek what unites us.
Since 2017 I collaborate with the great artist Jérôme Bèl, dancing as a solo artist in Dancing as nobody watching. We took this work to the Pecci Center in Prato and subsequently to the Biennale de Danse in Lyon. The work, seems to be made mo me: it’s about the state of presence, essential experience, abandonment. Outside the limits of the stage and the theater, outside conventional spaces.
In 2019 I met Marina Abramović: I was welcomed by her collaborator Lynsey Peisinger and was grateful and proud to participate in her Cleaning the House workshop. Me and other artists prepared and trained to re-perform some perfo of Abramović’s works during The Cleaner exhibition, in Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence. Strong and vulnerable at the same time, for a period of four months, I performed live re-performances of unforgettable works by Marina such as Imponderabilia, Luminosty, Cleaning the Mirror.
And from here the story continues …