Sofia Nappi is a young woman on a roll. Besides creating dance for companies around the world, the 31-year-old Italian is also busy creating and touring works for her own Florence-based group, Komoco. Working independently and leading Komoco is, she admits in a moment of fatigue, “a hard job.” A second later, she recharges, enthusing over her ongoing movement research into “the creature” inside us all. Getting in touch with that creature is a way to bypass the analytical mind and “tap into inner stories.”
Nappi’s latest explorations are taking place in Vancouver, where she is creating a piece for Ballet BC’s Trilogy mixed bill. When we spoke at the company’s Granville Island studios two weeks before opening night, she had just flown into town, keen to develop the work started last summer.
Rehearsals with the dancers began with what she calls “the zooming in.” This is an improvisation, to music, in which everybody dances, including Nappi. Zooming in is a way to set the scene, to get to know each other.
“I’m a person who cares about the human dynamic,” she says in her soft, Italian-accented voice. She wants to connect to each dancer in a meaningful way that will draw out their inner depths. “In Ballet BC, there are such beautiful individualities in the group.”
As part of the early process, Nappi also shared poetry with them, translating resonant lines by celebrated Italian writer Chandra Livia Candiani. Candiani, who has led poetry workshops in hospices and homeless shelters, writes about life with a profound sense of wonder that, Nappi says, makes her words so vivid. Nappi wants to explore life with the same vividness through dance.
Sofia Nappi with dancers. Photo by Duy Le.
Initially, dancing was merely a hobby to Nappi, who took piano lessons and was a competitive swimmer as a child. During a year as an international student in a Burnaby high-school dance program, that changed. On a school visit to New York, she discovered The Ailey School, founded by the great African American dance artist Alvin Ailey, and was drawn to its inclusive environment, with students of diverse backgrounds from around the globe.
Once there, experiencing the equally diverse training, Nappi says, “the African class, or just the soul movement, really touched me, connected to the earth, to our origin. And also the study of Martha Graham technique, which is all about the centre, with that strength from the core.”
Her understanding of dance deepened when she travelled to Tel Aviv to train in Gaga movement, the expressive, improvisational form developed by Ohad Naharin for both professional dancers and the general public. Gaga is still “inside my body, it’s inside my blood, but so is everyone in my past,” Nappi says.
Hofesh Shechter’s raw, visceral movement is inside, too: Nappi aspired to dance with his London company, making it almost to the end of a gruelling audition (her first after graduating from The Ailey School in 2017). She was obsessed with taking company classes and workshops, until, she says, “I wanted to take some space for my own self.”
That is when “the wheel of my life twisted completely different, and the idea was whether I would do more auditions and follow maybe the intention to become a dancer or follow the opportunity that was given to me as a maker.” Prominent among them: a commission for the 2019 College Danza program of the prestigious Venice Biennale dance festival, then under the direction of Quebec icon Marie Chouinard. The next year, the festival premiered a second piece, for the main program.
Commissions snowballed, leading to the present one from Ballet BC artistic director Medhi Walerski, returning Nappi to the west coast of Canada.
After our interview, it was time for the afternoon rehearsal. Nappi put on some lively music as the dancers warmed up. Then rehearsal director Emily Chessa (until this season a Ballet BC standout performer) organized a run-through of a section featuring all 16 company members.
With their very first moves, these young men and women in rehearsal sweats and T-shirts transformed into powerful creatures with spines of quicksilver, erupting into lunges and quick changes of direction. The choreography had its own full-body logic, its own creaturely beauty.
“I have been craving this kind of work,” dancer Jacalyn Tatro told me earlier. “Sofia is really into this exploratative world of energy. It’s not ever about the lines and the shapes, but more so the energy that we create in the space and feed off from one another and to one another.”
Tatro also performs in the other two works on the bill: Walerski’s Sway, created for Nederlands Dans Theater 2 in 2019, and Shahar Binyamini’s Bolero X, which Ballet BC premiered in 2023.
Bolero X has become a global phenomenon: Binyamini has remounted his muscular prowling response to Ravel’s hypnotic score for companies seemingly everywhere. The mega-sized cast of 50 (Ballet BC will again be supplemented with dancers from Arts Umbrella) adds to the excitement.
Sway is a more technical work, reflecting Walerski’s ballet heritage, with only seven dancers. Does this give Tatro a chance to stand out? That, she tells me, is not the point. “Stepping up to the plate a bit more, you don’t have so many other dancers to feed off of, but you all have the chance to be a little more intimate with each other and to take care of a small group of people.”
At the end of my interview with Nappi, she shared the title of her work, Lila. The word has several meanings, including, in Sanskrit, “divine play” or simply “play.” Not a bad prompt for audiences, pointing to how we might approach Nappi’s work and, in fact, the whole evening of dance.
Trilogy plays Queen Elizabeth Theatre November 6-8 at 7:30 p.m., Saturday matinee 1:30 p.m.
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