Ottavia Cantenacchi and Julia Müllner start a new collaboration based on their previous researches.
Julia’s research – permeable wings
What if choreography were a fly?
I dance as if I were many flies.
My research revolves around my fascination with the insect of the fly (she/her) and her relationship to choreography. I am drawn to micro-choreographies that exist beneath larger structures. I document the nature of the fly: her habits, behaviors, physiology and appearances in literature, poetry, and painting. I study her ways of being and moving through the world, and translate these observations into dramaturgies and choreographies for dances. Part of my performances are written texts, between fact and fiction, that take the shape of calligrams. They undergo an editing process informed by my background in graphic design. permeable wings is a dance that zooms into micro choreographies of disturbances. It does not depart from a place that sees something as undesirable, but instead seeks to shift scale and perspective. The fly Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly, is one of the central characters in the piece. She, the undesired, yet the most widely studied species in laboratory research, enters into dialogue with her extended family. She teases Musca domestica, also known as house fly, who flits through the piece like a comma, interrupting each sentence with her buzzing presence ,,,,,,,,,,, permeable wings are surfaces that allow air and fluids to pass through, or to soak in. They are porous, internally and externally. In this work, permeable wings are imagined as bodies that extend their intimacy beyond the limits of their membranes. Drawing on the writing of Stacy Alaimo, whose research spans environmental humanities, science studies, animal studies, literature, cultural and gender theory, the piece explores the idea of ontological intimacy: a mutual dependency in existence, a relationality that exceeds the skin, where boundaries are porous and fluid.
Ottavia’s research – The Script
The Script begins from a tendency to daydream and a desire to dance. From this drive, a layered choreography unfolds—of connections, expectations, journeys and geographies. It inhabits the fragile, tense space just before something happens—a moment charged with potential, where anything feels possible. The performance invites the audience into an imaginative world where attention, distraction, and curiosity coexist. Pretending becomes a generative act—sometimes serious, sometimes humorous—allowing moments of absurdity, sentimentality, and intimacy to emerge. With the audience all around the white stage, two dancers are engaging with “the script”—both as a physical object and a metaphor for destiny, fate, and an invisible structure framing our lives. They flip many pages, get distracted by their dreams, engage in precise steps and movement phases, kiss, meet in a couple dance, leave the stage, invite a printer into their dance. They follow the script – imagined – resist it, detour from it and sometimes surrender to it. The spectators’ eyes shift from large patterns of steps across space to small, intimate details, like what is hidden inside a pocket. Dancing becomes a stream of thoughts, flirting with meaning, approaching representation, and then stepping back or to the side to sustain a state of abstraction.
In The Script, the art of pretending takes center stage; leaning into a stream of thoughts that manifests through daydreaming into dancing and unfolding of potential scenarios. At its heart, the performance navigates dance as a material created from inhabiting imaginary scenarios and as a suggestive method of generation of new scenarios—a space where fiction emerges, reality stretches, and longing takes form. The work harbours an ambivalence, crafting atmospheres and performative conditions that transport the viewer into multiple realities where the epic and the mundane, the real and the fictional, coexist. The performance carries a subtle allusion of witnessing another’s secret, as if peering into the intimate situations that compose the romance of living.
Short bio
Julia Müllner works with dance and lives between Vienna and Stockholm. She holds a Bachelor in Dance and Choreography from the Danish National School of Performing Arts (2019) and studies (until spring 2026) the Master in Choreography, SKH in Stockholm with Jennifer Lacey. Julia works on her own projects and in the group maria mercedes, as well as for choreographers such as Krõõt Juurak, Kristina Dreit or Elizabeth Ward. She received a scholarship for Music and Performing Arts from the Austrian Ministry of Culture (2021) and a danceWEB scholarship at ImPulsTanz (2021). In 2023 she was part of the dance group PARASOL at Tanzquartier Wien. Her work has been shown at brut Wien, Tanzquartier Wien, WUK, Bridging Cologne, Močvara Gallery, KEX Kyoto, Kunstverein Eisenstadt, or Haus.Wien. Ottavia Catenacci, dancer and choreographer, studied contemporary dance at Scuola del Balletto di Toscana. In 2019 she graduated in Scenography from Urbino Fine Art Academy, during which she attended the Vilnius Art Academy as an exchange student. In 2022, she graduated with a BFA in Dance and Choreography from the Danish National School of Performing Arts. She performed for Masako Matsushita, Maria Francesca Guerra, Samuel Feldhandler, Snorre Elvin, Renan Martins, Matija Ferlin, Doris Uhlich, Iván Pérez and Aske Thiberg. In 2023 she worked as an apprentice at Dance Theatre Heidelberg (with Iván Pérez) and Danish Dance Theatre (with Marina Mascarell). She created Glory was at the fingertips (2019), A Bridge/in case you will forget (2020, produced by HangartFest) and godsibb (2022). In 2024 she participated at Vetrina della giovane danza d’autore eXtra with the solo Gossip Body. She has an ongoing collaboration with Ella Östlund with the project YOUR HEART OUT. She is currently attending an MFA in Choreography at the Danish National School of Performing Arts.
