Biography

Elisa is a choreographer and dancer originally from Italy. She graduated from SNDO School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, where she is currently based. Her choreographic research articulates around notions of relational movement and materiality in relation to the body and its affective dimensions. She is interested in the body as a transformative technology through which one can potentially access new (or lost) perceptions of reality. In the past years, her practice became the ground for artistic exchanges with various visual artists, writers, and dancers and has been disseminated through workshops. In 2016 she was awarded the Young Talent in Choreography from OpenFlr, Florence, and in 2018 she obtained a scholarship for the dansWEB residency program at Impulstanz, Vienna. Since 2019 she has been one of the members of Jacuzzi, a convergence of Amsterdam-based choreographers.

In Himalaya, choreographer Elisa Zuppini continues her research into the understanding of reality as a complex entanglement of relational systems. This time she does so by drawing inspiration from contrasting elements: she thinks of the extemporaneous and textural features of the geological realm, the fragmented temporalities of the digital space, and the repetition and obsessiveness of mechanical bodies. In Himalaya, she explores the clash between these systems, as if they were moving tectonics that collides but does not completely fit with each other.

This can be seen as a metaphor for how these systems possibly operate in our perception: disjointed, related, forced and unsettled.

In collaboration with producer and DJ James Whipple (M.E.S.H), these ideas are explored in a constant relationship between sound and movement. Whipple's sound interventions, sourced from both the geological and the synthetic, act as splinters and tectonic waves, encountering the body, reflecting off of it, or bypassing it completely.