Philip Glass is the American composer at the origin of minimal music who – at the turn of the century – has been a protagonist of the music scene and has significantly influenced the renewal of the performing arts worldwide. Starting with the revolutionary Einstein on the beach created with Robert Wilson in collaboration with Lucinda Childs as choreographer and performer in 1976, the contamination of music, dance, theatre and visual arts has had in Philip Glass the iconic composer of reference in the four corners of the world. In 2024 – on the occasion of the publication of the Etudes for solo piano played directly by Philip Glass with his personal piano in his Manhattan home and 30 years after their first publication – Dancing Glass wants to pay homage to the figure of the great American composer by highlighting the original characteristics of his musical creativity. In the prestigious venue of the Auditorium della Nuvola, an iconic building designed for EUR Spa by the architects Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas, a large glass casket that poetically contains a cloud that in turn contains a stage, Dancing Glass is a performance/event in which 12 Etudes will resound in dialogue with an equal number of original creations commissioned from 14 international choreographers, musicians and video artists, and presented in world premiere with the artistic curatorship of Lucinda Childs for dance and Oscar Pizzo for music.

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The extraordinary mosaic will thus be composed of 5 new creations by the American Lucinda Childs, Golden Lion for dance at the Venice Biennale, the Brazilian Cassi Abranches, trained and now resident choreographer in the famous Grupo Corpo ensemble, the Japanese Shintaro Hirahara, author of the choreographies for the opening and closing ceremonies of the last Tokyo Olympics, Michele Pogliani, former dancer in the world tour of Einstein on the beach and now head of the young Roman formation MP3 dance project – established worldwide with the show “Relative Calm” created by Lucinda Childs and Robert Wilson in 2022 – who will be performing all the choreographies, with the exception of the South African performer Llewellyn Mnguni who will be on stage with his own creation.

Philip Glass’s multicultural musical references are evoked by the original arrangements of the Turkish musician Kudsi Erguner, a leading exponent of the Sufi musical tradition, the South African composer Philip Miller, known for his work alongside William Kentridge, by Roberta Cuña Valente with her Brazilian music ensemble ‘Choro’, by Mana Yoshinaga virtuoso of the kotò, the traditional Japanese instrument, and finally by Anna-Liisa Eller virtuoso of the kannel, a traditional Estonian instrument, who will exceptionally close the two events with her live performance. Live performances of the Etudes for piano will be given by pianist Jacopo Petrucci.
For the video-art component, the famous Iranian- American video artist Shirin Neshat, Golden Lion at the Venice Art Biennale in 1999, the Japanese Hiroshi Sugimoto, Praemium Imperiale in 2009, the multimedia artist Fabio Cherstich and the Italian collective Anagoor, which has gained international attention precisely for its contamination of theatre, video-art and performance, will be part of the two extraordinary events