Mario Bianchi, << KLP Teatro >> July 2025

"On stage, there’s a constant attempt to reassemble, in its full expression, a bodily presence that has long been violated and fragmented. Even when the choreography appears to approach resolution, the body cannot stand on its own, it collapses. And in the end, the color of blood asserts its rightful, painful triumph. Yet at the same time, those same bodies seem to embody an inner strength for reconstitution, a singular and wondrous being that deserves protection rather than the degradation it so often suffers. Epiphania. I Make Myself Manifest powerfully echoes the company’s previous work, once again affirming the force and radiance of the female body."

Inequilibrio 2025. The 28th edition of Armunia’s festival in Castiglioncello

Gabriella Gori, << DANZASI >> July 2025

"Epiphanīa, from the Greek epiphàneia, fiinds in its subtitle, I Make Myself Manifest, the key to unlocking this original creation, in which Michele and Antonella continue their exploration of the paradoxes of womanhood. Their work lingers on the alienated and alienating image of the female body, a body so often commodified, driving women to perceive and live within it as something estranged from themselves. Set in a kind of “non-place,” lit by Alessio Guerra’s cold lighting and framed by dark wings and backdrops designed by Bertoni, who also designed the costumes, the three performers (Sara Cavalieri, Valentina Dal Mas, Ludovica Messina Poerio) present fragmented representations of the body. At times, these take the form of headless, metamorphic figures that both conceal and reveal the essence of each performer."

Epiphanic Traces of Denied Bodies

Renzia D’Incà << Rumorscena >> July 2025

"This work by Abbondanza Bertoni is visually intense, it unsettles the viewer, as it should. The violence lies in the depiction of the female body: not explicitly violated by men, though perhaps that threat looms in the background, but worn out, drained, by the constant pressure of having to perform a feminine corporeality. A corporeality so elusive, it seems nearly impossible to even speak about it anymore, especially in a country like ours, where the female body is still too often reduced to a reproductive or erotic object for male use. On stage, and more hauntingly, just beyond the curtains, fragments of bodies emerge: legs, buttocks, and for most of the piece, only the dancers’ long hair is visible, intentionally covering their beautiful faces from the audience. Through this, the three dancers “tell” the story of their bodies, not as mere flesh, but as vessels of a feminine DNA, of lived experience and inheritance. Their performances are nothing short of extraordinary."

To Investigate the Invisible Is Possible at the Inequilibrio Festival

The Pulse of Origin

We continue to turn our attention to the feminine, to the baggage of contradictions it still carries, and to the persistence of cultural inheritance. Both obstacle and tool, almost always a prejudice, the woman's body precedes her: she must come to terms with her body, negotiating between necessity and desire.
This is where we began, driven by the doubt that in her appearing—and thus in her being and living—a woman is, first and foremost, a mouth, two legs, her buttocks… chasing an ideal that makes her feel like a collection of parts, imperfect.

The performance

Like shadows of life on a battlefield, three dancers, suspended, wavering souls in a state of lucid sleepwalking, reveal themselves through visible and hidden layers, forming a symphony of actions that unfolds like a forest of signs and meanings. They are portraits suspended between identity on display and exuberant visual expression. A carnal femininity, yet detached from the absolute protagonism of the human body, makes way for the immaterial. The subject becomes object, and only then is its sovereign status acknowledged. Balanced on the edge of detail, we trace brushstrokes, clots, and transparencies, unraveling the meaning that details hold within the fabric of life. Gesture points and suggests without stating, an expression of thought that is almost painterly, uncanny, and emotionally intense. The dramaturgy dwells on micro-moments. In what seems to be chaos, it unravels like the chapters of an exploded book. Appearances and disappearances unfold within a spatial trap, in a blackness that is the color of origin and return, the color of where we come from and where we will go. A non-place that is a room, a labyrinth of rooms nested within each other, a whole house, the world itself: hyper-paintings that speak through images and nourish themselves with silence.

Antonella Bertoni

“Three women came to me, from deep within the heart”
A room of one’s own, a women’s corner. Scalene: it goes without saying. A testing box that defies any safe rooting in the feminine body, a surrender, raw and unfiltered, to a dystopian perspective. Women in fragments, fragments of woman, within a box of limbs that breathes, multiplies, collapses as a single organism. The helpless creativity of these disassembled bodies becomes the mark of their return.
From three to one, and from one to a thousand feminine forms, not smooth, but folded, pleated, like pins on a pincushion, they pierce the stage. Blade-bodies, glimmers and coquetries compose a tapestry of appearance, where the warp becomes the very act of seeing, fixing a first stitch, a cross-stitch, naturally, both a beginning and a snag, held together by a thread of glory. Now that women have discovered that man is no longer God, we hallucinate here an imagined reassembly of their scattered selves. <

“Three women came to me, from deep within the heart”: Thanks to the generosity and boundless trust of Valentina, Ludovica, and Sara.

Michele Abbondanza