The performance-in-the-making, premiering in February 2027, uses memory and imagination to tell another story of Venice. Through the city, the ensemble explores histories and connections that shaped Europe, looking beyond its familiar image towards the Mediterranean, the Middle East and North Africa. The mosaics of San Marco offer a way of approaching these histories: like seemingly unrelated fragments that gradually reveal their connections, the people, places and materials that made Venice possible begin to form a larger picture of Europe — one whose imagined centre is inhabited by elsewhere, and whose beauty holds the traces of other worlds.
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In the making: En–Knap Group in the Cansiglio Forest
The Cansiglio Forest in the Venetian Prealps was another filming location for the new performance by Mattia Cason with En–Knap Group, premiering in February 2027. The dancers’ visit is part of a research process that approaches Venice through the places, people and materials that remain embedded in the city.
We admire the city without remembering the forest underneath it. I would like to remember the forest.
Mattia Cason
The Cansiglio Forest offers one example of Venice’s dependence on its surrounding woodlands. Its timber was particularly valuable for producing the oars that propelled Venetian vessels across the Mediterranean, sustaining the city’s trade and maritime power. Venice depended on wood not only to navigate the seas, but also to stand above the water. Thousands of wooden piles form the city’s foundations, creating a particularly interesting image; an “upside-down forest” beneath its buildings.
The very same plateau also holds a history of migration and skilled labour. A small Cimbrian linguistic community survives there, descended from craftspeople who migrated from Roana on the Asiago Plateau. First arrivals, in 1707, were scatoleri: craftspeople who made boxes, typically from beech wood. These migrations became permanent in the early nineteenth century. Their descendants still preserve the Cimbrian language and traditions, but the community is shrinking.
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Filmed material will become a part of the piece that aims to bring video and live movement into close relation. Cason and the seven dancers are creating through historical sources, artworks, personal testimonies and visits to the places. In the studio, they explore how a body can convey an image, and how a succession of movements can tell a story. Mattia describes the ambition as a “narrative dance”: one capable of telling as many stories as there are islands in the lagoon or pieces in the basilica’s mosaic.