Dance and Inclusion: A Meeting with Ela Franscella

By Giorgio Thoeni. Wednesday, January 9, 2019, 6:30pm, Accademia Teatro Dimitri

Swiss choreographer and multidisciplinary artist (performance, video art, plastic arts) Ela Franscella was born in Locarno and works in Switzerland and Paris.

After training in the field of marketing and visual communications, she founded her own communications agency at the beginning of the 1990s, where she worked for over ten years. She then left Switzerland to pursue training in psycho corporal and dance therapy. She works with artistic-expressive movements such as Laban-Decroux, Butō, and Contact-Improvisation in Paris. In Switzerland, she works as a dance therapist in Swiss clinics specializing in psychosomatic care, as well as in institutions for people with disabilities. At the same time, she continues her artistic research, and the development of new languages of dance movement.

She is the creator and manager of the artistic cultural center Expyriment on Monte Verità in Ascona, where she is responsible for organizing meetings and cultural events. She conceived the Icosahedrum, an object designed for movement education, exhibited and used at the major teaching institutes of Laban dance in the world (London, Paris, New York, Strasbourg).

Over the last ten years, she has developed a methodology and training curriculum for young and adult dancers with Down Syndrome. In 2008 she founded the non-profit association, school, and company of contemporary dance MOPS_DanceSyndrome, a unique artistic, cultural, and social organization in Switzerland and abroad, of which she is president. In 2018 she received the Pro Ticino Award for her artistic, cultural, and social message. As a choreographer and artistic director, she creates and produces shows brought to the stage by the company, and supervises the short films of video art that are submitted to international festivals of dance, cinema, and culture, arousing keen interest and exchanges at the European level.

On Wednesday January 9^th in Verscio, Ela Franscella will meet the students and the public in a debate about “dance and inclusion”, mediated by Giorgio Thoeni.