Wanda Moretti

Wanda Moretti

A choreographer and researcher, her dance studies focus on systems of proportion and the harmony of the space. She is the first dancer in Italy to have undertaken vertical dance in 1990, developing and spreading this practice before creating a specialist technique and creating performances in which space and movement merge in a single scene. In particular, her artistic project concerns the relationship with the architecture and the landscape, the dance insinuating itself in any vertical environment and conversing with it, adding a value that completes the actual place. Parallel to this is her research on how the structured space influences human movement. Her vertical dance performances have taken place at numerous festivals and various national and international events. In 1994 she and the musician Marco Castelli founded the Compagnia Il Posto www.ilposto.org in Venice.

Since 2000 Moretti has focussed her attention on site-specific creations for historical and museum sites. Ideal spaces for reflecting on the past and the future, for emotional explorations and experimentations, these spaces have acted as catalysers of the choreographer’s new artistic direction, in which the relationship with the place is of primary importance. Parallel to her choreographic work, she has also done personal research into the educational potential of dance in a social and extracurricular setting. She participated in the first Training Course for Dance Educators run by the Centro Mousikè in Bologna together with the History of Dance sector of DAMS University of Bologna and Aterballetto.

In 2002 she won the third Museum Education Competition run by the Veneto Regional Government with her project Le arti visive attraverso il corpo e il movimento (visual arts through the body and movement). She carries out educational activities, training courses and workshops for museums and other entities, and for many years has run a research programme working with prisoners in Venice’s women’s prison, developing a dance education pilot project that is the only one of its kind in Italy, working alongside the Ministry of Justice, the Veneto Regional Government and DES – the National Dance Education Association. She is registered with the Albo Nazionale Danzeducatori® (National Dance Educators Institute). In 2007 and 2008 she was a lecturer at the Faculty of Design and Art at the University of Architecture in Venice. Since 2008 she has worked on the M.Ed. in Theatre through Art Education; in 2011 she worked on the M.A. in Pedagogic Actions and Interactions through Narration and Theatrical Education at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in Milan. She was a lecturer at the Faculty of Communication and Art Education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino from 2010 to 2011. She occasionally works with the Faculty of Motor Sciences at the University of Padua.

In 2010 she created the International Vertical Dance Network, which unites the most important companies in the vertical dance world, a project presented on www.verticaldancecompany.blogspot.com. In 2011 she created and developed Vertical Suspension Training®, a teaching method for wall dancers. Moretti continues with her research on vertical surfaces and architecture, and publishes texts and articles about vertical dance, art education and the possibilities of learning through the body in movement.

Wanda Moretti