Viola Esmeralda Grappiolo

''Art stirs opposites, coming closer to a transcendence where everything is one and one is nothing''

credits by Florian Moshammer

Viola Esmeralda Grappiolo (2001) is living a dazzling beginning of career. She graduated just 20 years old at Codarts University of the Arts in Rotterdam and danced already with Ballet de l’Operà de Lyon and GoteborgsOperans Danskompani, with repertoire by Alexander Ekman, Pina Bausch, Imre e Marne van Opstal, Damien Jalet, Lukas Timulak, William Forsythe. The young dancer from Cuneo, city in northen Italy, tells her experience and explains how she stays inspired with art in its most various expressive forms with soft and open heart.

You began studying at a very young age at PNSD Rossella Hightower in Cannes, which are your first memories from this educational experience?

The school prepared me both for ballet and contemporary techniques with great professionalism opening up new horizons. It was there that I met my teacher Francesco Curci, also a Codarts graduate, who suggested me to follow the training in preparation for Codarts’ audition which took place in Livorno. I used to wish becoming a ballerina. Contemporary dance broke through my life later. In hindsight I would have get bored doing the swan, I would not be able to imagine myself in that role.

You’ve been admitted in Codarts before finishing high school.

Yes I did, I got filled up with high school education. It was painful wearing point shoes and I was tired to feel framed in a technique that was restraining, I wanted to go beyond. I felt a need for more stimuli, more creativity around me, in ballet academies it is still difficult to find it. I acknowledged quite soon that this was a path for me and I took it immediately.

credits by Victor G. Jeffreys

From Codarts onward you did not stop. Opera de Lyon first and now GoteborgsOperans Danskomani. How did you live these lightning fast changes in your career and in your life?

Yes, it is true, everything happened very fast. In life we meet people who see that something unique you have got to say, they acknowledge your dancing and open up unexpected doors. There is sensitivity that we share and we can read, something that touches both parts involved. I feel much gratitude towards each of them.

What would you have had avoided in your path of growth through dance?

I would have had avoided hearing some comments on my physical appearance. Some teachers gives spontaneous and superficial opinions instead of looking for what you really might need, they cannot see through the pain and trauma that this behaviours might generate.

What would you say if you could meet yourself as soon as you arrived in Cannes?

Something that I still tell myself since I often get caught in thinking what it will be, instead of living here and now. I would say be what you are. Do not fear following your path. In the end it is what I did, I followed what I wished, yet there has been moments in which I was doubting if what I was doing was right, like when I choose to dedicate myself to contemporary dance. At a certain point I realized that there were not such things as right or wrong. There is me in this exact moment, the rest will come. Time resolves. I shall not judge myself.

What would you ask if you would meet yourself in ten years?

I though you’d say Callas (laughs). I would ask myself what is the secret.

And to Maria Callas?

(laughing) the same question, where is the mistery?

Why Callas?

Because she transcends the sensitive, she is beyond. Her singing is a over-human scream and simultaneously extremely human.

credits by Florian Moshammer

What does inspire you?

There are things that we humans being as such we will never grasp nor understand. With art we get closer to the mystery, the secret. Obviously one would never know or perhaps will never know that you know. I am inspired by Duras’nouveau romans, Nouvelle Vague movies. Movies in general, light! Sometimes I see some lights and I am being transported like in memories. Lights that are memories, memory and oblivion. Duras, Pasolini, Godard. People that searched their way towards the secret, without saying it. There is something in their writings, a sensitivity that touches me.

Are you fascinated by the unsaid?

The unsaid that is fully carnal, tangible.

Where is the limitation? In which way being human is a limit to the discovery?

We are humans yet we are not infinite. I believe infinity is within us. There is a Universe within, but we cannot reach it with rationality. We shall combine rationality and irrationality. Chaos and equilibrium, these opposites that attract each other and yet never touching.

Is art a tool to mix these up?

Art stirs opposites, coming closer to a transcendence where everything is one and one is nothing.

What do you perceive when improvising a dance with closed eyes?

I realized that I dance a lot with eyes closed. I was rehearsing a duet and for most of the time I was with eyes closed. There is something that unlocks, a letting go without a need to produce. There is just time, movement, I feel the air moving around me. I don’t see outside and there is like an ipersensibility in each of my tendon, small muscle, cell, atom. That’s the most wonderful thing.

A state of iper-coscious matter?

Couldn’t say it better.

What does attract you towards movement research?

A need, something that has to come out from les entraille, from the entrails of myself. It the organs that want to leak out.

Turning inside out like a sock?

Yes, upside down inside out! It reminds me of Feldenkrais Method. How to be efficient finding new paths of the organism in space. To thinking space differently, the space moving me, me moving the space and both things together.

credits by Victor G. Jeffreys

How do you describe the experience in the dancing organism? Limits, corporeal bordrs, spatial perceptions.

Everything becomes a continuous flux. One can’t pin down where one finishes and the other starts. They are superposed veils. The mixing of space, body, and movement in time. A matter made up of these four elements that line up and misalign, they bend and extend.

How do you decline your such articulated identity in relation to the different creative methods of choreographers?

It is difficult. Some choreographers needs people artistically porous, they don’t require you to make sequences yet they perceive your predisposition. Alexander Ekman is an example for me. His art is focused on the image, using dancers like pawns in space and time. Nevertheless when we were shooting material to be projected on stage he directed me in a way that allowed me to stay true to myself. There was this out of focus body moving in a very slim way, a bit sensual. This doesn’t happen usually. That’s something difficult in a dance company, sometimes we need to find other paths to stay sensitive.

We are talking about the role of contemporary dancer in repertoire companies in Europe. How do you prepare to become a choreographer’s pawn in the transition from agentive to acted upon?

I am always the same person. At the moment of the creation I am being acted upon. Later when the piece is finished it becomes of everyone. When being on stage you gain again the agentive qualities. Being only acted upon is a contradiction for a contemporary dancer. A lot of dancing material is often made by dancers.

this article has been published in the number of June 2023 on the italian magazine DanzaSì.