COLLETTIVO CINETICO was founded in 2007 by choreographer Francesca Pennini and involves over 50 artists from diverse disciplines. The collective’s research explores the nature of the performative event through formats that are both playful and rigorous, moving within the interstices of dance, theatre, and visual arts. A key feature is the development of methods for composing and organizing movement capable of engaging highly diverse bodies, as well as devising systems that explore the relationship with the audience and perception, ranging from the stage to urban spaces, from mimetic actions in everyday life to virtual platforms. CollettivO CineticO has produced 64 creations and received numerous awards, including: Jurislav Korenić Award for Best Young Theatre Director; Rete Critica Award 2014 for Best Artist; Danza & Danza Award 2015 to Francesca Pennini as Best Choreographer and Performer; UBU Awards nomination for Best Performer under 35; Hystrio Iceberg Award 2016; MESS Award at the BE Festival in Birmingham 2016; National Theatre Critics Award for Dance Theatre 2016; UBU Award 2017 for Best Dance Performance; Grand-Prix Golden Laurel Wreath Award for Best Performance at the 58th MESS Festival in Sarajevo for Sylphidarium Maria Taglioni on the Ground, also nominated for UBU Best Sound Design. In subsequent years, CollettivO CineticO was again nominated for the UBU Awards in the “Best Dance Performance” category: in 2021 for Dialogo Terzo: In a Landscape (also nominated for “Best Costume”) and in 2022 for Manifesto Cannibale. In 2023, Francesca Pennini received the Ada D’Adamo Award for research and inclusivity. Since 2013, the company has been supported by the Italian Ministry of Culture, by the Emilia-Romagna Region since 2015, and is currently part of the international project Crossing the Sea. Their works have been presented in Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Peru, Poland, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, and via live streaming in the USA and Korea.

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FRANCESCA PENNINI (Ferrara, 1984) – Choreographer, director, and dancer – trained through a diverse and unconventional path, ranging from gymnastics and freediving to butoh and disco dance. She later studied at Balletto di Toscana and the Laban Centre in London and worked as a dancer with Sasha Waltz & Guests. Since 2007, she has been the artistic director of CollettivO CineticO, founding the company and creating over 60 works. She has also choreographed for Balletto di Roma and the National Company of Malta and collaborated with artists including Mustafa Sabbagh, Vasco Brondi, Quentin Jones, Pamela Z, and Ramón Oliveras. Passionate about education, she has taught at Biennale College Danza, Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Hochschule Hannover University of Applied Science and Arts, DAMS Bologna, and is currently a faculty member of the Theatre and Performing Arts program at IUAV University of Venice. In 2022, she co-curated part of the Centrale Fies program with B. Boninsegna. Her new project, Abracadabra, began with an extended residency in Montréal (NID Platform – MIBACT) and involves an action of disappearance.

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“The sense of play and irony that Pennini brings to her work is a sign of a highly alert understanding of the state of bodies and their position in the world, even in catastrophic terms. One can dance or remain still: between these extremes unfolds Francesca Pennini’s restless choreographic journey, which speaks not only to our eyes but primarily to our minds, prompting them to venture into the universe of questions.”

Ada D’Adamo Award for research and inclusivity in contemporary dance

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“Strong presence, honest performance, excellent sense of humour have built this play to be politically and esthetically a strong comment on the midst of our daily life.”
GRAND PRIX Laurel Wreath Award for Best show at 58°th International Festival MESS of Sarajevo

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“Rigorous and insubordinate, precise and unpredictable, eccentric and audacious. These are the artists of CollettivO CineticO, one of the most remarkable formations of the new Italian scene, founded in 2007 at the crossroads of dance, theatre, and visual arts. Within less than a decade, the group led by Francesca Pennini and Angelo Pedroni demonstrated the endless possibilities of experimentation. Choreographies, performances, unconventional stage objects, and devices for non-obvious audience interaction: [...] CollettivO CineticO’s work is a dynamic prism where investigations of movement and space converge with new technologies, contemporary art, mathematics, physics, philosophy, manga and cartoons, social networks, and 21st-century anthropology. Complex systems, Renaissance in the breadth of skills, highly contemporary in how they identify critical points and paradoxes of our era. The spirit is playful, the gaze sharp, the intelligence nonconformist. To these gentle yet relentless guerrillas, full of grace and irony, a well-deserved Hystrio-Iceberg Award.”

Hystrio Iceberg Award

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“The company has established itself nationally with originality and creativity, reformulating and renewing the language of dance-theatre. CollettivO CineticO’s creations challenge the audience, engaging them with irreverent and hilarious poetry, natural body gestures, and the established grammar of dance. The term ‘kinetic’ in the company’s poetry denotes a relationship with movement, not only in dance but in all gestural forms. Spectators become participants, their gaze an integral element of dialogue in Pennini’s work, balancing bodies and space, not necessarily on stage. The company’s poetic actions express the fluidity and permeability of performative languages, offering shared visions of the present, embodied by performers and made possible by the audience’s gaze.”

ANCT Award

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“From the outset, Pennini’s work is distinguished by its ability to stage performances balanced between the mathematics and poetry of gesture, where dance and theatre become opportunities—for both the artist and audience—to rethink live performance. Open to contamination from other performative forms, from contests to parades, and videogame languages and manipulations, the company has leveraged the fruitful rupture of adolescence, creating a compelling ‘school’ capable of working deeply and constructively with young people.”

Rete Critica Award

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“Alongside Angelo Pedroni, Pennini leads CollettivO CineticO, a company suspended between performative action and full-scale spectacle, open to dialogue with the community and contemporary life’s fractures, with a focus on younger generations. Pennini increasingly demonstrates how research can be fused with poetry, whether in ten mini-ballets, solos drawn from childhood memories, or collective projects like Amleto, a playful talent-show-style reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s icon, or in eliciting reactions from dancers in Le variazioni posturali degli abitanti. At the Venice Biennale of Dance, Pennini impresses with originality, compositional coherence, and interpretive skill.”

Danza & Danza Award