Mon, 25 January 2021

Edivaldo Ernesto awarded

[This text has been translated electronically.] With »I can't breathe«, the dancer touched not only the visitors of the Ludwigsburg Festival. His renewed performance at the Romaeuropa Festival in September also convinced the jury of the Italian Danza&Danza Awards. We congratulate Edivaldo Ernesto for the award as best dancer 2020!

Modest, but anything but simple Edivaldo Ernesto and trumpeter Marco Blaauw embody the composition »I can''t breathe« by Georg Friedrich Haas – in memoriam Eric Garner. Without any props the two artists make that injustice tangible to which George Floyd fell victim and which eventually made global waves. With his piece, Haas »gives the perpetrators [...] no sounds«, but to the victim a funeral dirge. Ernesto internalizes and translates these sounds into his characteristic language of movement, whose powerful accusation gets under the skin without clumsy pantomime. You can watch the performance from the Ludwigsburg Festival 2020 at our Digital Stage. At the Romaeuropa Festival Blaauw's trumpet sounds came from the tape, but the dance performance lost none of its thrilling gesture and convinced the jury of the annually awarded Danza&Danza Award 2020.

The dancer, who comes from Maputo, Mozambique, has been enriching the international dance scene for about 20 years with his improvisational and collaborative ideas. Still in his home country, Edivaldo studied traditional Mozambican dance and added contemporary dance to his spectrum of movement. Since 2008 he has been a member of Sasha Waltz & Guests, with whom he has been working on the project »Dialogues Roma 2020 - Terra Sacra« at the Romaeuropa Festival last summer. They presented their first guest performance since the first Lockdown - and embedded in it »I can't breathe«. Independent of the company, he worked with dancers such as David Zambrano, Judith Sánchez Ruíz, Robert Hilton and Mat Voorter and also distinguished himself as a choreographer and teacher.

We congratulate Edivaldo Ernesto on this award and are very happy that he will to the Ludwigsburg Festival in 2021 with several projects.