Piero Ramella participated in the Artists Encounter at Spring Forward 2025

Piero Ramella‘s background spans too many disciplines to count. He studied philosophy, taught capoeira, worked as a professional painter, completed a postgraduate programme in Brussels, devised walking performances. Along the way, he also trained in dance and movement with Masaki Iwana, Lucia Palladino, Frey Faust, and João Fiadeiro, and has since taken on various roles in the dance and theatre fields. As a performer, dramaturg, and assistant director, he currently works mainly with the experimental theatre group Anagoor, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice Theatre Biennale in 2018, and the Portuguese collective Um Cavalo Disse Mamãe.

You have had an incredibly versatile career. Would you say that your experiences can be summed up as a mixture of visual arts and movement?

I have more of a synthetic vision of it. I was studying philosophy, but the kind of linguistic output it deals with was very, very narrow for me. So visual arts was the most open thing I could go for. But it’s very sad to be a painter. You wake up alone, do your work alone and then you go to bed. Then I went to Milan because a friend of mine asked me to participate in her performance of experimental theatre. At this point, I was a capoeira teacher, I had already been studying Butoh dance for a couple of years, so I had some sort of alphabetisation of movement. I started to do more and more theatre work, less and less painting, and I kept studying movement or dance. So at a certain point, I started to work also in dance pieces.

But performing is just one of your roles – you’re also a dramaturg and assistant director. The overlap of responsibilities that’s so typical of contemporary theatre and dance can be a form of creative freedom, but do you think it also gives you more control over the process?

Well, I have a lot of roles, but I’m almost never the director: I’m always an amateur. I don’t know how to do anything. I just jump into projects because I feel good with people, and then I learn how to do something. Co-authorship is something I’m interested in, and theatre is unavoidably collective. You can be whoever you want, but if no one turns on the light, there’s no show. And that’s why I mainly work with people who know me and would like to have me around their project. I do what they ask me to. If they ask me to dance, I dance. If they ask me to cook, I cook.

From the look on your face, you seem surprised that you do.

I’m surprised that people ask me to do things. Often I don’t know how to do them, so it’s funny.

But it’s obvious you’re good with people.

Well, I try. You cannot do deep work if you don’t have a deep relationship with people. No one’s a genius alone. It’s all about people – about a lake of ideas. Ah, you’re interested in ‘Polly Pocket’? Let’s go ‘Polly Pocket’! That’s why I’m more interested in theatre than in academics, because the materiality of academics is usually a piece of paper or a PDF with footnotes. And this can capture some things, but many others fall outside of that.

You wrote your thesis on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. How do you think Wittgenstein would dance?

Writing can totally be dancing if you go into the material[ity] of reality, the movement. Wittgenstein had a bizarre way of writing. He would mix personal things and philosophical stuff in albums and notebooks. Then he would read these things to a typist, cut the pages into pieces and repaste the text in a new order. This is totally his dance. Think about it. Writing, reading, cutting and pasting to make infinite piles – it would be an amazing dance piece. You wouldn’t know where a certain idea comes from, or where it goes.