Cristina Kristal Rizzo & Diana Anselmo: Monumentum DA

Bologna’s Gender Bender, a multi-disciplinary festival founded to ‘bend’ gender and body stereotypes, revolved during its 23rd edition (25/10–8/11/2025) on the theme of ‘risk’, understood as a process towards achieving change and re-positioning oneself. With Mauro Meneghelli solely at the wheel of the festival direction, Gender Bender programmed an array of works challenging beliefs and conventions; some of them leaving an immediate impact and others revealing their potential in the way they linger in the mind to gradually change our perspective. Among them, Monumentum DA, a work of performance activism by Cristina Kristal Rizzo and deaf performer Diana Anselmo (DA) that amalgamates two distinct corporeal languages: dance and sign language (LIS, Italian Sign Language).

Dressed in identical outfits – red trousers and white blouses, with Rizzo also wearing a short wig – the two performers consecutively introduce their movement portraits. Anselmo, after removing his hearing apparatus, effortlessly navigates the silence – considered, as the projected text explains, merely an ‘invention of hearing’. In an attempt to make a deaf audience feel Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, he visualises the music by blowing his cheeks as if playing a wind instrument, knocking the air with his fists and rhythmically bouncing his arms. Standing side by side, Rizzo and Anselmo choreograph sign language to the silent musical beat of a piece by Steve Reich, reconfiguring the gestural meanings into a dance. Challenging and exposing fissures neglected by the official historical narratives, Monumentum DA also rethinks dance ‘monuments’, as in the case of the song ‘The Man I Love’ in Pina Bausch’s Nelken, which, as the artists argue, misappropriated the American Sign Language.

Defying spectacularity and virtuosity,

as advocated by citing Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto, Monumentum DA unfolds through actions of translation and transmission from one body to the other, blurring the limits between a codified and an almost abstract language. Both movement languages – as texts written through and with the body – intend to convey meanings that require careful, attentive reading. In Monumentum DA, Italian Sign Language is seen as a corporeal archive to invest, explore, expand and take care of, while dance is approached as a medium to connect. Through a process of seeking mutual proximity between the worlds of hearing and reading, the work naturally emerges as an inherently accessible performance for deaf people that nurtures our questioning of the world of ‘silence’.