BOLZANO.- The Antonio Dalle Nogare Foundation will host during the Festival Bolzano Danza/Tanz Bozen the performance The Third Body. Koffi Kôkô, renowned choreographer and dancer from Benin, joins the German musician and composer Manos Tsangaris and the writer Johannes Odenthal to explore the link between movement, music and text. The Third Body is a kind of rite of initiation, a contemporary rite between body and sound, between inside and outside, in which dance, text, rhythm and meditation create a sense of community.

The dialogue between the dancer and choreographer Koffi Kôkô from Benin, the German musician and composer Manos Tsangaris and the writer Johannes Odenthal began in Berlin in 2018 with the idea of rethinking the relationship between body and sound, movement, music and text. Since then, they have realised several performances, including at the Museum Kolumba in Cologne or at the ImPulsTanz festival in Vienna, in which structure and improvisation alternate. Understood as a “library of knowledge”, the body wanders through history: for Kôkô, dance is not only physical exercise, it is rather a source of inner strength true to the animistic cultures of West Africa, of which he is a representative as Dah, a “spiritual master”.

From the beginnings of African voodoo rites to the present day, the dance creates a connection to the nature and the immaterial. Tsangaris, for his part, speaks of scenic anthropology, where the body is not only at the centre of his work as a percussionist, but also provides new sensory experience for the audience. Sound and spatial arrangement create a third possible space, hence the title of the performance The Third Body: a kind of rite of initiation, a contemporary rite between body and sound, between inside and outside, in which a sense of we grows out of dance, text, rhythm and meditation.

Festival Bolzano Danza
The Third Body: Koffi Kôkô/ Manos Tsangaris/Johannes Odenthal
On the occasion of Bolzano Danza‘s performance The Third Body, the Foundation will observe a special evening opening on Saturday, July 22, starting at 8 PM.