IO – The Embassy of Italy and the Italian Institute of Culture in Jakarta, in celebration of the 70th year of bilateral relations between Italy and Indonesia, have organized the dance performance “Hopera” by E.sperimenti Dance Company of GDO. The performance was held in Gedung Kesenian Jakarta on September 3, 2019.
The E.sperimenti Dance Company of GDO is an Italian dance ensemble directed by Patrizia Salvatori and has performed across the globe, including in the United States, Russia, South Korea, Jordan, Thailand, and has also previously visited Indonesia.
The Hopera dance performance was first presented in Beijing and Shanghai, and takes spectators through a beautifully-choregraphed but familiar and modern story. The performance is filled with light-hearted humor and guides spectators through various classical melodies by Verdi, Leoncavallo, Rossini, Handel and Mozart.
On bringing classical music to the newer generation and how modern dance is looked up compared to opera in Italy, Director Patrizia Salvatori explained: “Some professors let’s say… oh this is part of the Opera, blablabla, maybe you touch something… but I’m saying, let people touch, otherwise you will leave it in their wardrobe and you’ll never come back out. I prefer one person of 10 years old goes out saying… ma pensiero, it’s a song… maybe I don’t know Italian. Verdi? Technological people (taps phone) … Oh! He’s a composer from Italy. Wow! During the study they used to say Viva Verdi, Red Italia, that is against the dictator… you read the history, you look for something, you open your mind, you communicate with the others.”
The Italian Embassy has ongoing events to help strengthen and celebrate Italy and Indonesia’s bilateral relationship. “The 26th we have another, a different concept, a music, in the framework of cultural program of our cultural center in cooperation with embassy of Italy. This year we are celebrating 70th anniversary diplomatic relations between Italy and Indonesia and so we have a rich cultural program but not only in terms of artistic and cultural event, so we also have some scientific seminars and we opened our program in March, last March. We had an exhibition in National Museum whose title was “Italy: The Beauty of Knowledge”, so it’s a combination of artistic and cultural values of Italy and scientific innovation of Italy, modern, because we want to offer to our Indonesian counterpart a complete vision of contemporary Italy,” explained Italian Ambassador Vittorio Sandalli.
Later, after visiting Bangkok, the E.sperimenti Dance Company will return to Jakarta to train dancers from the Jakarta Intercultural School as part of the Interscholastic Association of Southeast Asian School Dance Exchange program, from September 5th to 19th, 2019. (Rimar)