Crystal Pite – NDT 1 & Kidd Pivot
A site specific project for Collezione Maramotti
Commissioned and coproduced by Festival Aperto/Fondazione I Teatri - Reggio Emilia in collaboration with Collezione Maramotti and Max Mara
1 – 4 October, 2026
Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia
Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite has been a defining voice in contemporary dance for over 35 years. She is renowned for creating works that courageously address themes such as trauma, addiction, conflict, consciousness and mortality; her bold and original vision has earned her international acclaim and inspired an entire generation of dance artists.
Her new project – part of the Festival Aperto 2026 programme – is a collaboration between Fondazione I Teatri / Festival Aperto, Collezione Maramotti, her own dance company Kidd Pivot, and leading contemporary dance company Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT), where she has been an Associate Choreographer since 2008. The work will be developed in dialogue with the architecture of Collezione Maramotti and its collection and will be performed by dancers from NDT 1 and Kidd Pivot, continuing the collaboration begun in 2009 between Fondazione I Teatri, Collezione Maramotti and Max Mara aimed at creating a dialogue between choreography and visual arts.
Dance as a force that wears a human body
For Crystal Pite, craft is a vessel through which she moves towards art. Approaching creation from the identity of the craftsperson, choreography becomes a kind of handwork: to build, assemble, trim, tinker, revise and polish a work is to expose its shiniest insights.
This attention to craft is the starting point for her new creation. Pite reflects on the Collezione Maramotti’s original function as the Max Mara factory, and on the craftspeople who once worked there.
“The tailors and seamstresses who made their living there, whose hands produced the garments that made the brand famous: theirs was the craft of making clothing for the moving, breathing human body. My own craft is not dissimilar: I like to think of dance as a force that wears a human body,” she shares.
This perspective also connects to her ongoing interest in animation, puppeteering, and the craft of deception. In these uncanny illusions of aliveness, we confront the question of consciousness itself.
Over the years, at the invitation of Festival Aperto, performances by Trisha Brown Dance Company (2009), Shen Wei Dance Arts (2011), Wayne McGregor | Random Dance (2013), Hofesh Shechter Dance Company (2015), Saburo Teshigawara (2017), Dimitris Papaioannou (2019), Peeping Tom (2021) and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (2024) have been presented at Collezione Maramotti.