Old people dance happily and a little clumsily, they look like peasants from the countryside in their waistcoats and suspenders. They wear large mask heads, Sofia Nappi's piece irritates by juxtaposing the wrinkled, kind faces and the amazing agility of the bodies to which they belong. Why do we feel like puppets in our own lives sometimes? "IMA" is about the masks behind which our feelings wither away, it is about the baggage we carry with us, which we unpack to sort it again and again, like in a ritual. In the involuntary loneliness of the last years, the young Italian choreographer felt even more intensely how ambitiously we plan for the future, how stubbornly we cling to the past - and how we rarely stand in the midst of the moment. It is precisely this living in the now that her young bodies with the old heads are looking for, these strange figures that seem to come from a far away land, freeing themselves from masks and memories to unite with themselves in the physical sensation of dancing. The masks fall only when we accept ourselves and when we are open to life happening now, to what is new.

In her idiosyncratic style, often sparkling with subtle irony, Nappi places virtuoso punchlines in the increasing dynamics; in her penchant for the grotesque, she draws inspiration both from the gaga nonchalance of Israeli dance and from the rustic gnarliness of the Northern choreographers. "IMA" means the moment in Japanese, in Hebrew the word also stands for mother, associated with birth and renewal. Already with her first works, Sofia Nappi won several awards, most recently the first prize at the International Competition for Choreographers in Hanover, Germany in 2021. "IMA" was commissioned in 2020 by Marie Chouinard as dance director of the Venice Biennale, the full-length version premiered at the Colours International Dance Festival in Stuttgart in 2022.

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