Between man and animal: the Fernando Montaño Dance Gala at the Teatro Romano

Spoleto, July 1, 2023 - One more dance star for Festival dei Due Mondi: tomorrow night at at 21:30 the Colombian dancer Fernando Montaño is expected on the stage of the Teatro Romano for an extraordinary Dance Gala that includes the premiere of his new show Buena ventura. Originally from Buenaventura, a small town on Colombia's Pacific coast, Montaño was a dancer with the Cuban National Ballet and a soloist with the Royal Ballet. Forbes Colombia listed him as one of the fifty most creative Colombians along with to Shakira and Fernando Botero; since 2020 he has been an Ambassador for the Marine Conservation Society UK. Creator of a style that fuses tango, African folklore, ballet and urban dances, he has placed the relationship between human and animal at the center of his new work, reversing the perspective of Ovid and Kafka's Metamorphoses: now it is the animals to transforming into human beings, and to finding themselves in a hostile world. The show is directed by to Alejandro Buchelli, and Fernando Montaño is joined on stage by dancers from the Ballet d'Jèrri Company. The show includes choreography by Pedro Lozano Gomez, Garrett Smith and Sir Frederick Ashton.

"The show in a way is about me, about my life, about the "good luck" that from Colombia brought me to Cuba, then to Italy and to London. A long journey filtered on stage to Spoleto by dance but also by music, rhythm, the many elements I assimilated along the way," Montaño says. "I wanted to do something fresh and more modern, connecting it to current events, to what is happening in the world especially in relation to the behavior that humans have toward animals and nature. Colombia, for example, is the second country, after Brazil, with the highest percentage of biodiversity. But the Amazon Rainforest, its green lung from which the entire planet benefits, must be protected just as its fauna and animal species in general must also be respected. So I wanted to show what, for example, an animal can feel when, transformed into a human being, it is to living to contact with a world full of contradictions, aggressive but also full of beauty and feelings of love. And vice versa, how may feel a human transformed into an animal being, forced to to live in its violated natural environment. In this "play" of parts, man has the opportunity to learn a lot from nature. The ballet also embraces issues related to the climate crisis."