Elena Sgarbossa participated in the Artists Encounter at Spring Forward 2025
What happens when we slow down? This question is a recurring theme in the work of Italian movement artist Elena Sgarbossa. Since her first choreographic work, 2019’s KEO, which won the DNAppunti Coreografico award, she has been dedicated to taking time as a way to safely tread the deep waters of emotion.
She is also drawn to community-based movement projects, which have informed her practice and led her to create room for reflection, intimacy, and connection. Along the way, Sgarbossa co-founded BASE9, a collective exploring co-creation in movement.
In your choreography, you explore the relationship between the body, emotion, and the subconscious. Can you talk about how you approach that?
I start from something I can really fall in love with. I noticed over time that I fell in love with the ‘emotional body’ of people. I’m interested in how we can observe it from a mathematical point of view, how we can observe emotionality in a structured way. During my research, I like to do long practices in time and to guide an exploration, which can be really deep. It’s also a strategy for my work, and a form of protection when you dig in and share something.
There is also the element of surprise. That, for me, often comes up as a letter. When you open a letter, there’s this moment of suspension: you don’t know what’s inside. So, asking someone to write me a letter, or if I write a letter about something that is related to the piece that I’m working on – it’s a link to the memory of a tender moment. It’s a tool for digging into the unknown, into memory, the archive of the body.
What does this element of surprise bring you during your practice ?
I noticed that the surprise they bring can be a turning point to establish something solid – for example, a physical practice or a posture. It’s being in dialogue with someone or something that can twist all the cards and allow for something new to emerge. I like working in a form in which physical practice and also writing and reflecting can come together. So having these two forces, like embodiment and imagination, is something I am very fond of.
How do you feel that your work has changed over the years, specifically after participating in projects like Dance Well, which is aimed at people living with Parkinson’s, and Empowering Dance, which researches soft skills in dance practice?
Dance Well was important in terms of shaping my physical practice at the beginning, because for me life is the starting point. And Empowering Dance influenced the vocabulary that I use, or the frame in which a practise works – maybe it’s more empathy, more negotiation, or actively listening to yourself or the environment. I found that the power of language is that it’s accessible, especially for people who do not work in the field of art or dance. You can negotiate between ‘I’m going towards you’ and ‘you come to see something that I propose to you’, and ‘I’m reaching you’.
COVID-19 also influenced me because I started choreographing in 2019, and then the following years were [focused on] putting together strategies for surviving, composing, and listening, as our desires and practices changed.
What would you like an audience to take with them after experiencing your work, especially SWEETHEART?
On the one hand, something about having the time to see or to process something. When you see other people, you start to relax in parts of the body, and your posture starts to change. I think that at the moment, I’m moving towards relaxing parts of the body. Maybe it’s one of my needs, or the need that I see in others.
On the other hand, a lot of my work is about closeness – the power of simple actions like walking together, seeing something together, maybe exchanging a secret with a stranger, and finding time to breathe.