La Prima Danza is a site-specific contemporary dance project born from the collaboration between Fondazione Fabbrica Europa and Bigi Paoletti/Fritz Company, led by Damiano Ottavio Bigi and Alessandra Paoletti. The project aims to transform spaces of historical and artistic heritage into performative experience settings articulated in several chapters, fostering a deep connection between territory, place, artwork, and audience through dance.

. 

[en] The second chapter of La Prima Danza, entitled The Butterfly Dream, premiered in Seoul in October 2025 at Nakseonjae Hall, within Changdeokgung Palace, and will be presented in Europe in June/July 2026 across several heritage sites. The project is supported by Fondazione Fabbrica Europa, Ahn Aesoon Company—one of the most prominent artistic entities in the Korean contemporary scene—and by 2025 Kore.A.Round Culture – Bilateral International Collaboration Program for Arts & Culture. Here, Damiano Ottavio Bigi and Alessandra Paoletti, together with Korean choreographer Ahn Aesoon, develop a double bill featuring dancers Na-eui Kim, Ji-hyung Kim, Seong-hyeon Park, Hyeon-seok Lee, You-joung Lim, and Joung-youn Son.

The Butterfly Dream draws inspiration from the complex historical trajectories of Changdeokgung Palace, understood not merely as an architectural site but as a place shaped by political transformations, destruction, reconstruction, and unresolved processes of memory. Once a dynastic residence and ritual space, later a site wounded by war and colonial occupation, and today a museum and heritage site, the palace is approached as a spatial and symbolic framework, embodying a trajectory shared by many other places where architectures from different historical periods accumulate, leaving both material and immaterial traces.
Rooted in the Korean context, the work opens onto a broader and more universal perspective, placing Changdeokgung in resonance with other sites that have undergone analogous processes of transformation and re-signification. The historical density of these spaces becomes a field of choreographic and dramaturgical research, and the performance operates within them as a means of mediation and activation, inviting the audience to perceive these places not as closed objects of the past but as active presences in which historical and symbolic stratifications continue to generate contemporary resonances and tensions.

Note: The performance is composed of two distinct sections, each approximately 30 minutes long: one choreographed and directed by Bigi Paoletti, and the other by Aesoon.

.