Chiara Bersani

Chiara Bersani is an Italian artist working in the field of performing arts. She trained in the field of theatrical research with influences from contemporary dance and performance. Her first choreographic work, Family Tree, received several national awards including the Perspective Dance Award 2011 and was part of the NID Platform 2014.

The Political bodies series started in 2013 as a research project and was divided into three performance experiments presented to the public between August 2015 and September 2016: Tell Me More (a performance with a chorus of 8 male voices), Miracle Blade (a movie with a dysfunctional family) and Goodnight Peeping Tom (a performance with four performers). Gentle Unicorn is the continuation of this series. In 2016 she started a collaboration with the choreographer Marco D’Agostin with whom she created The Olympic Games in 2017, co-produced by K3 | Kampnagel (Hamburg) and the European project BeSpectACTive!

Among her long term and regular collaborators are Marco D’Agostin, Matteo Ramponi, Babilonia Teatri, Alessandro Sciarroni and the cultural association Corpoceleste_C.C.00#. Other major collaborators include the Madrid based company La Tristura, the French choreographer Jérôme Bel and the Argentinian director and playwright Rodrigo Garcia.

Watch a short film about Chiara Bersani undertaking a Europe Beyond Access artist residency at Oriente Occidente researching Moby Dick and its themes of seafaring, perspectives seen from afar, waiting, being and uncertainty.

Gentle Unicorn

Description: ‘You aren’t the one interpreting me, I’ll show you the way to understand me. I take the responsibility to draw the image that the world will have of myself.’

Gentle Unicorn is a solo of subtle beauty and intelligence. In it Bersani approaches the figure and imagery of the unicorn from her own physicality.