Alessandro Sciarroni + Simon Johannin

A shared Nomadic Night

Alessandro Sciarroni, Save the last dance for me

Dance

A choreography by Alessandro Sciarroni

With Gianmaria Borzillo & Giovanfrancesco Giannini

When the choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni discovered the polka chinata in 2018, only five people in Italy knew the steps. Born in the early 20th century in Bologna, this highly physical dance of seduction performed strictly by men calls for the dancers to clasp each other, twirl around and bend down until their knees practically touch the ground. For Save the last dance for me, Sciarroni is collaborating with the dancers Giannmaria Borzillo and Giovanfrancesco Giannini, and the master of filuzzi dance (ballroom dances typical of Bologna) Giancardo Stagni, to revive this folk tradition in danger of disappearing.

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Simon Johannin, Notes sur la ville

Spoken word

With Simon Johannin & Etienne Ciquier

His characters could be the heroes from films by Harmony Korine or Larry Clark, books by Jean Genet or Virginie Despentes, and so could he. The young poet and novelist Simon Johannin is interested in precarious populations and contemporary forms of marginality, both social and geographic, with language deftly veering from crude to delicate and finely worked. In 2017, at the age of 23, his first novel L’Été des charognes met with critical acclaim – a lyrical, punk initiation story taking us into the mind of a kid bored out of his mind in an isolated rural setting. Nino dans la nuit, co-authored with his wife Capucine Johannin, met with the same enthusiasm in 2019 – a feverish crepuscular story, with festive flashes and social darkness, celebrating the energy and angst of a precarious, nocturnal and fiery youth. In 2020, he published Nous sommes maintenant nos êtres chers, his personal and consuming first collection of poems, in the same vein as his novels, the words throbbing with a thousand images.

“I can’t see myself doing things without this intensity, even at the risk of overflowing a bit at times. In fact I need this overflow, this bursting forth and eruption. I have a sensorial relationship to art. I’m really not too much of an intellectual: things have to happen in the body, I have to physically feel things. This collection of poems is poetry mainly derived from sensations.”

Simon Johannin, interviewed by Arnaud Laporte on the show Affaires Culturelles on France Culture, October 14, 2020.

For this Nomadic Night, Simon Johannin will present Notes sur la ville, a new text written for the occasion, in one of the rooms of the Damien Hirst exhibition Cherry Blossoms.