The mountaineers

Few things are more fun in Madrid at the moment than following Italian dance company Kor’sia around the Spanish capital. Sometimes you see them in the Teatros del Canal, a sober, multi-story box-shaped building that is reminiscent of a movie theater. It is a multiplex of cultural life, unlike the Centro Cultural Conde-Duque, the baroque barracks whose sheer size blows every tourist away.

Acting on an intuition that it is still possible to found an independent company from scratch amid such buildings – ancient or brand new – in Spain and success on an international scale, the two yellow-clad Italian ballerinos behind the troupe launched their careers in the country with a street theater company. They call themselves Kor’sia. Their founders are Antonio de Rosa and Mattia Russo, both from Naples, who met in Rome when they began their dance studies at the Accademia nazionale di Danza at the age of fifteen. They then moved to Milan to continue their studies at the Accademia Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Antonio de Rosa stayed on for a while, danced at La Scala and moved to the Compañía Nacional de Danza de España in Madrid in 2011. Mattia Russo, on the other hand, went straight to the Spanish Teatres de la Generalitat Valenciana as a dancer and then to the Introdans company in the Netherlands, before also joining the National Theater in Madrid.

Here in the center of Spain, they also met Giuseppe Dagostino and Agnes Lopez Río and founded the Kor’sia collective, which did not immediately take on its own ensemble, but instead offered guest choreographies, for example for the now-defunct Victor Ullate Ballet, for the Konzert Theater Bern in Switzerland and the Ballet de l’Opéra national du Rhin in France. In between, they had adventures that I’ll tell you about in a moment.

They are currently touring with their company “Mont Ventoux,” an unusually successful evening of dance based on a letter by the early humanist Petrarch. A man from the 13th century tells of climbing the mountain of the same name in the middle of Provence. The result is an extremely evocative choreography that captures the spirit of the times as thoroughly as our responsibility towards the planet demands. The 13th century? They really do go back a long way. But they satisfy the tastes of both lovers of traditional dance art and admirers of the 21st century avant-garde, and this in equal measure.