At the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
_ T. S. Eliot
Our Team
Theatre Turnings is a collective of young international artists that flourished in New York City in 2020. Founded by a group of Italian immigrant students in America, it has grown through years of national and international collaborations. Our work has been developed through various residencies and festivals and presented in numerous venues and theatres.
Our Goals
Theatre Turnings is a young multidisciplinary company that uses dance, theatre and music to tell compelling and meaningful stories. We believe that different arts can enhance each other. We create theatre that reaches a wide audience while maintaining artistic integrity. We want to blur the lines between lyricism and comedy to create engaging and well-rounded performances. We seek to create a new aesthetic that enriches the dreamlike and symbolic language of dance theatre with compelling stories that focus on new texts and characters.
Our History
The Theatre Turnings collective was founded in 2020 in New York by Sara Grassi, Luca Villa, Sara Santucci and Alessia Seclì.
It has worked in the United States and Europe, creating original productions for adults, teenagers and children.
<Uno stile percettivo>
-A perceprive style -
_cit : Marianna Catellani
Our Pledge
Theatre Turnings: We choose this name to indicate our hope of taking unexpected turns, of finding new ways to merge different performance arts, and of surprising our audience and ourselves. We try to do it both on stage and during the creative process. We refuse to adhere to rigid hierarchical structures, we refuse to follow standard casting discriminations (we will never have a height requirement for our
dancers) we refuse to produce elitist work, we refuse to be self-referential, and we refuse to feel smarter than our audience.
We recognize the continuous and disproportionate centering of men and their point of view in the stories told on stage. Considering that women are about half of the population and the vast majority of theatre audiences and practitioners, the number
of actresses on stage and female characters is incredibly low. We want to talk about
women as complex, fully-rounded human beings. When gender is not key to the plot we consider performers of any gender for a role: why would we restrict the possibilities instead of finding the actor that most resonates with the character?
Our History
The Theatre Turnings collective was founded in New York in 2020 by Sara Grassi, Luca Villa, Sara Santucci and Alessia Seclì. As an international company with members in Italy and New York City, we created and produced online projects such as A Pandemic Day ofSun during the first wave of the pandemic. We then all moved back to New York and performed short pieces at theatre and dance festivals, in addition to curating company classes (dance, acting, voice, singing and devised composition) that helped us develop our skills, share our strengths and strengthen our connection as a group. Now, our members are based all over Europe and the United States and keep creating together.
Our performances are multidisciplinary: combining choreography with acting and textual research, we want to present new or renewed stories that can interest and engage as wide and diverse an audience as possible. For this reason, we have developed productions in both Italian and English aimed at children, such as "Viola & Lucy the Little Star", or at adults, such as "Always in Rimini", both with a completely unedited and original script.
Each of our works, as a consequence of our creative method (devised theatre) and with the aim of achieving the most representative and effective version of the core potential of a project or an idea, is developed and perfected through residencies, festival performances and workshops, before presenting the final project in its integrity in venues and theatres. We observe and use audience reactions and responses to these early materials to continue with the creative process.
A clear example of our creative process is "Yes!", a short piece developed from "a heap of broken images" taken from various texts by modernist authors: it was first performed as a workshop/R&D performance, first at the Queens Performing Arts Festival at the Salvatore LaRussa Dance Theater in 2020, and then at the Mark DeGarmo Dance Festival (New York City, USA) in 2021. It premiered in its final version in 2022 and will be developed into a full-length production - 20s - in the future.
Last year we focused on our first full-length production: "Always in Rimini". We researched inspirations and historical information and began to work on the play from the first scene, which we presented during the ITSLIQUID festival in Venice, with the aim of getting feedback and testing our choices in front of an audience. The play was then developed through an R&D residency at the Sesto San Giovanni Arts Council (PuntoZero). The piece was selected among other works to be further refined through a second residency at PuntoZero, which will culminate in a week-long run of the show at the Arts Council's venue in the month of February 2024.
