Stella Spyrou
Diásporas
Diásporas is a participatory, site-responsive device built around walking as ritual and soundscape. Performers and audience members co -create a living, evolving rhythm through the act of synchronized or overlapping footsteps . A textured soundscape of many individual rhythms is happening at once, creating something complex and collective. The performance invites spontaneous participation, transforming the space into a resonant map of collective movement and memory. The soundscape emerges in real time—organic, immersive, and grounded in the body.
The Stella Spyrou Dance Company explores cultural identity, diasporic movement, and the fusion of traditional and contemporary dance. With a focus on African diaspora rhythms and grounded movement, the company opens dialogue on identity, belonging, and the diasporic experience. Stella Spyrou, an award-winning choreographer and instructor, combines her expertise in Afro-Brazilian dance with inclusive practices, working with mixed-ability groups to foster a welcoming space for diverse bodies. Stella, who holds an MSc in Mechanical Engineering and a BA in Contemporary Dance Practice, is deeply influenced by her studies in Afro-Brazilian dance, emphasizing grounding, pulse, and groove. Her works include óMNIRA, an exploration of liberation honored at MASDANZA, Cloud in Trousers, inspired by Mayakovsky’s poetry, and Entropia, addressing chaos and order with a mixed-ability African dance group. Diásporas, a site-specific work on diasporic identity and statelessness, was developed in the U(R)TOPIAS Academy of Choreography. Stella has led African dance workshops for mixed abilities and collaborated with Athens and Epidaurus Festival, Liminal and Touch Compass.
Elenita Queiróz
Tracce di paesaggio. Tra immobilità, fiducia e contemplazione
Landscape Sections is a live, site-specific performance shaped by participatory experiences that blend stillness, movement, text and relational presence. The project transforms landscapes into shared spaces of composition, reflection and connection. Participants engage in guided interactions that unfold gently across time and space. Instructions—offered by fellow participants—range from simple gestures to poetic invitations like “Look up,” “Dream,” or “Talk to the river.” These create a subtle choreography rooted in curiosity and mutual presence. Rather than treating the landscape as a passive backdrop, the work activates it as a co-performer—alive with textures, histories, and rhythms. Together, human presence, and place form an open, ever-evolving narrative. The experience fosters a collective atmosphere of joy, reflection, and respect.
Elenita Queiróz, a Brazilian-born choreographer, performer and cultural manager, combines passion, intuition and feminist themes in her work, most recently exploring the tensions within motherhood and grind culture. Based in Switzerland since 2016, she has collaborated with international artists and institutions and created her own work over 22 years. Recognized with the 2023 Werkbeitrag St.Gallen and the 2021 TanzPlan Ost Choreography Prize, her latest works include Warning for Contemplation Sections (2023) and The Fabulous Ones (2024). Queiróz holds a Master's degree in Expanded Theatre from the Hochschule der Künste Bern, a postgraduate degree in Cultural Management from SESC São Paulo, and a Bachelor's degree in Dance and Pedagogy from UNICAMP. She has recently collaborated with Brigitte Walk and Beatrice im Obersteg, participated in the Paula Interfestival and the IBK Bodensee Conference, and worked with Konzert und Theater St. Gallen, choreographing Der Anonyme Liebhaber (2022) and performing in Breaking the Waves (2021) and Wilhelm Tell (2024).
Rafael Candela
Forrest
Forrest is a performative device in which the performer establishes an informal and spontaneous relationship with public space and its inhabitants. Through movement, the performer travels through the environment, gently leading the audience along a chosen path and weaving chance encounters into the dramaturgy. Alternating between intimate moments and more participatory ones, forrest invites the audience to pay different attention to the present moment and to rediscover the everyday through a playful lens.
Born in 1998, half italian and half brazilian, Rafael Candela is a young dancer and performer. He trained professionally at the Paolo Grassi School in Milan, at the Biennale Theatre College in Venice, and participated in the DanceWEB program as a scholarship holder at the Impulstanz festival. He collaborated with a wide range of artists, including Alexis Vassiliou, Simona Bertozzi, Adrienn Hòd, Sharon Fridman, Ariella Vidach, Petra Fornayova, BTT Balletto Teatro di Torino / Manfredi Perego, and many others. In 2022, Rafael worked alongside Massimo Monticelli on the finalist project for DNA Appunti Coreografici. In 2024, he began collaborating with the DYES Collective, an artistic ensemble founded at Dartmouth College in Vermont. Additionally, he is selected for the Nuovo Grand Tour residency program, which will take him to Le Centquatre in Paris in 2025. Rafael’s debut work, Forrest, has been showcased at various festivals and invited to take part in an artistic residency at the Italian Institute of Culture in Paris.
Christina Gabriela Galli
Stille Tanzparty
Stille Tanzparty is a pop-up performance, a quiet moment possible everywhere, an experimentation with the senses and perception. Residents from the region dance to their favorite songs with headphones and tell us about their lives with their body archive. Music and movement remain strangely separate, we accompany them with our eyes and ears, they share an intimate moment with us.
I see people who dance, who hear something that I don’t hear, only see. I hear people I don’t see, who don’t dance but move. When my favorite song is playing, I hear the breath and see all the more what is moving. When there is silence, I can feel my feet stepping and see all the more that nobody is moving.
You would like to participate in “Stille Tanzparty”?
Dance Café
An Invitation to Move, Reflect, and Connect
What does dance mean to you?
When did you first dance?
What holds you back?
What music gets you moving?
Do you have a favorite song you love to dance to?
Would you like to dance to that song with others?
Come by the Dance Café – a space to be curious, to share your thoughts, and perhaps decide to take part in this unique participatory performance.
Christina will be there, ready to talk, listen, and explore the joy of movement with you.
Dance Café Gathering
7:30 PM – Osteria Vignetta, Mendrisio
Can’t make it to the Dance Café, but still curious?
Or would you like to participate directly in the performance?
Everyone is welcome — no dance experience needed, just a sense of curiosity and a joy for music and movement.
Get in touch with Christina
Tel. +41 76 526 15 81
- 3.7.2025 h 21.00 – Osteria Vignetta, Mendrisio
- 5.7.2025 h 20.45 – Al Cortiletto, Genestrerio
Christina Gabriela Galli (they/them, 1993, zurich) lives in zurich and works from there with movement/sound/mediation, dance/theater/performance/radio. currently christina works at the tanzhaus zürich and is responsible for mediation, makes radia once a month for radia lora, leads theater and dance courses at schools or cultural centers (including tanzhaus zürich, bühnerei winterthur) or realizes her own projects, from audio dance walks to site-specific performances. christina has presented performances at the zentralwäscherei zürich, the tanzfestival winterthur, the tanzfest and about us! zürich, among others. christina is inspired by movement research, butoh, experimental music, bodywork, radio art, queer-feminist theories, encounters, contradictions and limitations. christina studied dance and theater studies, contemporary dance and theater pedagogy in berne, rio de janeiro and berlin and shiatsu at the shiatsu school kreuzberg in berlin.
Eve Chariatte
Night Walk
Night Walk is an invitation to a nocturnal walk for a group of 25 people. After a collective and sensitive warm-up of bodies and minds, we’ll set off at the blue hour to encounter the darkness that settles and the spaces it creates, for a duration of around 1 hour. There will be time for discussion at the end of the walk.
In a world increasingly lit up and under surveillance, let’s take a walk in the woods and on the edge of our industrial zones, together, in packs and on the lookout, and experience the space-time that night offers us. Let us be carried away by its smells, its shadows and, above all, its sounds. Let’s face our fears together, arm in arm, and risk being moved by the powers of the night. NIGHT WALK is a journey through a piece of night, in an environment above all of sound, and in a low-tech way, this choreographic proposition recalls our bodies as powerful vibration sensors, exceptional listening bodies, gigantic ears. Thanks to the mediums of radio, voice and performance, a few flashes of fiction are added to the nocturnal relief to give it a poetic wavelength.
Eve Chariatte, dancer and choreographer, was born in the Swiss Jura and currently lives in Biel/Bienne. After earning a Bachelor’s degree in contemporary dance at SEAD (Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance) in Austria, she completed her training in research and choreography with the EXERCE Master’s program at the CCN of Montpellier in June 2018.
Her artistic research draws on numerous ecosomatic practices; the body becomes a material to think with, to politicize, and to poeticize worlds. She enjoys inventing bodily practices for various creations and research processes—practices that also take the form of writings, maps, and sound recordings.
As an organizer of artistic residencies in Switzerland (Les FAC, STAMM STUDIO 2012–2019) and Luxembourg (Esch – March 2022), she regularly invites different art forms to meet, explore the porosity of their boundaries, and question the notion of artistic production and creative methodologies.
Drawing strength from these intersections, Eve Chariatte moves between roles as a choreographer, residency organizer, artist-researcher, and performer. She currently works as a performer for Laurent Pichaud (FR) and les trois points de suspension (FR/CH), has collaborated as an outsider with Hamdi Dridi (TN/FR), and continues her long-term partnership with Joanne Clavel (FR) on the SILLAGES and RIVAGES research-creation projects. In 2022, she joined a long-term research project titled AVETA at La Manufacture in Lausanne, initiated by Julie Sermon.
Lorena Dozio
Ballade
Ballata_ Cross the forest, climb the stairs, and touch the sky / reduced version in situ is a project in which each spectator imagines and projects themselves into the story: the space and bodies repeat and transform simultaneously through accumulation and variation, adding new elements with every repetition. Abstraction brushes against narration, and tension dances with play. In this work, Lorena continues to explore the theme she has been developing for several years: making the invisible visible, but this time with a focus on a young audience. It will be a duet of dancers accompanied by the visual universe of the visual artist Cécile Meynier. The themes explored in this performance are the familiar and the strange, repetition and the unexpected. To do this, Lorena will freely draw from the book Romance by Blexbolex, which has captivated her with the space and freedom it offers the reader to imagine, read, and compose the story between pages and images, associating a word with each image.
Lorena Dozio, dancer and choreographer, studied at the University of Bologna/DAMS. She trained in dance and choreography at the Centre National de la Danse Contemporaine (CNDC) in Angers under the direction of Emmanuelle Huynh, and at the Royaumont Foundation’s Transforme program with Myriam Gourfink. She has been creating her own choreographic works for over a decade and also works as a dancer for other choreographers. Her choreographic work focuses on the question of how to make the invisible visible, exploring the relationship between the material and the immaterial. She conceives her work as a sensorial journey through thought, sound, gaze, and listening—a journey that opens up the imagination and amplifies all the senses to make it possible.
Alessia Della Casa
My Mum is a Monster
MMiM is a contemporary dance performance for both adults and children: through movement, it explores and blurs the two roles for a collective experience of body language, play, and creativity in relationship. Performers and audience together build a cardboard monster, dance with it, and jump inside it. With their imagination, they create stories and encounters that are told through the body, without words, while the stage space changes shape and makes room for new dances.
After her training in Northern Europe and the United States, Alessia Della Casa is now based in Italian-speaking Switzerland, where she works as a choreographer and coordinator of various cultural activities related to contemporary dance and a contemporary approach to the body. As a creator, in 2017 she was among the winners—together with Veicolo Danza—of the cantonal competition for dance mediation, launched by Reso – Swiss Dance Network and the Canton of Ticino's Department of Education, Culture and Sport, with the project Percorsodanza. In 2018, she was selected for the Young Audience Lab residency, promoted by Reso – Swiss Dance Network and directed by Erik Kaiel, with the project Becoming Little Red Riding Hood. In 2019, she was a semi-finalist of PREMIO SCHWEIZwith the project DANSONOGRAPHY. Since 2013, she has coordinated the Ticino in Danza festival, and since 2022, she has been developing a new Festival/Residency format, focusing the programming on new artistic practices of encounter and exchange among artists and with the audience.