Gianmaria Borzillo

Photograph of a performer kneeling in the hall with floral arrangements in the background

Femenine, Gianmaria Borzillo | ph Giulia Lenzi

Two performers on the ground, one in the foreground raises her legs and torso, the second in the background bends her legs

Femenine, Gianmaria Borzillo | ph Giulia Lenzi

Die back figures observe a dancer also bare-chested sitting on the floor

Femenine, Gianmaria Borzillo | ph Giulia Lenzi

Artist in residence

Performer, dancer and director, Gianmaria Borzillo is a multidisciplinary artist who moves between several languages: theatre, performance, literature, cinema and photography. He trained as a dancer at the Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi in Milan, where he graduated in 2017 and, at the same time, pursued a university career that ended with a degree in Modern Literature at the University of Milan.

In 2018, she works with Israeli choreographer Dana Yahalomi and her collective Public Moviment. She is among Alessandro Sciarroni's performers in Save the last dance for me and Augusto. His first authorial work, under the influence, received the special mention of the call for directors under 30 of the Venice Biennale in 2020 and the special mention of the jury of the Leo de Berardinis/Teatro di Napoli Prize.

Femenine is a place of listening and action, of discovery and beginning, a point of solitude and encounter. A queer space, a microcosm created for and by the music of Julius Eastman. A landscape that lives and slowly populates thanks to a total dependence on music.

Eastman is an African American queer composer and performance artist born in 1940. he is a well-known figure in the musical avant-garde. Throughout his career, he highlights the difficulties of acceptance and integration in 1970s and 1980s New York society. He proudly asserts his identity.

Gianmaria Borzillo is inspired by the artist's life and his composition Femenine. He uses a very rare recording from 1974 in which Eastman can be heard performing it on the piano. He creates an artistic work in which the performers undertake a gradual knowledge of the other as a discovery of the self, revealing on stage an intimacy, which brings with it themes such as personal or generational memory, desire, death, disappearance.