Photo credit:  Sean Mallia Photography

Naupaca Dance Factory, in collaboration with Pompea Santoro and Eko Dance Project welcomed an intimate audience at the Casino Maltese this week for After, a choreography-based project in two parts.

After revolves around the ideas of revision and adaptation.  Apart from looking back at past works, and reworking them in a new context, NDF is also reconsidering and challenging its ideas and roles within the Maltese Islands’ contemporary art scene.  By revisiting Purgatorio, the second act of DIVINA, a contemporary dance production that premiered in October 2014 at the Mediterranean Conference Centre, NDF is dismantling and reassembling part of its repertoire.  It looks to dissect and re-examine previously used methods, in hope of discovering new ways of presenting its views on dance.

This is also the reason why NDF have requested to collaborate with Santoro: her Non Solo Carmen revisits works of Mats Ek and Brigit Cullbert and presents them in a new light.  Santoro, like NDF, also believes in the importance of the roles that young and upcoming artists play in the contemporary dance world.  She founded Eko Dance International Project in 2012 with the aim of helping young dancers grow artistically through classical training and the study of Mats Ek’s choreographies.  Similarly, NDF has also developed a dance programme for young people who aspire to become dancers and artists on a professional and semi-professional level.

Since its foundation, NDF has sought to explore dance as an interdisciplinary medium and to create and share ideas about bodily movement and artistic expression.  It has been an honour and a pleasure for NDF to collaborate with Pompea Santoro, a leading figure in the world of comtemporary dance, who throughout her long and prolific career, has always championed and cultivated a sense of innovation and experimentation in dance technique and performance.