A Love for Dance: Photo Session with Andrea

Andrea is a lovely, warm and friendly person, and a talented dancer for LeineRoebana dance company. If you love dance, you probably saw him already on stage at Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam or in other Dutch cities. I’m glad he gave me the chance to photograph him, even though we had to cut the photo session short because of camera malfunctions. But that’s fine, we will repeat the experience soon, and get all the shots we planed! For now, I thought I would show you a few pictures from our first session and share some thoughts from Andrea on what dance means for him.

” My name is Andrea, and I started my beautiful dance journey when I was 16 y.o. in a small town from Sardinia, Oristano. I started with hip hop and classical ballet, then slowly got closer and closer to contemporary dance.

I now work in Amsterdam for the dance company LeineRoebana, dans en musiek, since January 2018. I have an extreme, infinite and special love for this company, because here I feel I can finally be who I really am: a full human and a dancer. I am not just a body there; I am not a machine; I am an artist who found his place to develop creativity at its maximum and beyond.

I have studied in Florence for two years, absorbing any kind of contemporary techniques that I had in front of my eyes. I was and still define myself like a sponge; I have this terrible curiosity about anything that can move in space. After Florence, I moved to Amsterdam to study for three years, plus one stage year at the Theaterschool in the old department MTD (modern theatre dance). I graduated in the summer of 2018.

Throughout my life, dancing was my biggest weapon against everything that I was going through: accepting myself as a homosexual person while living in a country where this wasn’t (and still isn’t) okay or even allowed. I could find peace and the acceptance for myself as human in the dance community.

When I move I open up myself fully and who you see, what you feel and hear, well, that’s me. No boundaries, no walls to climb, nothing. That’s my whole soul out there for you all, and you can make a choice to see and explore it or just watch it from the outside. I am fine with both.

People asked me many times: “Why do you dance?” I love dancing. Dancing is the purest way to communicate with people and easiest to reach their hearts. I love exploring people’s hearts. It’s beautiful to be able to dance “inside of them” — because that’s where you go, as dancer/artist, you enter the deepest emotional part of all the other human beings who are watching you. I dance to transmit vibration, feelings, emotions, to myself, the planet, and anyone around me.

Dancing allows me to expand myself both spiritually and physically — my personality, my heart, everything that I am made of, both on the concrete and abstract level.

When I move I open myself up fully and who you see, what you feel and hear, well, that’s me. No boundaries, no walls to climb, nothing. That’s my whole soul out there for you all, and you can make a choice to see and explore it or just watch it from the outside. I am fine with both.

I always hope that people can connect to me, my energy and my heart.

I love dancing because it gives me that power that I wish I’d have all the time in my life (laughs). I need to move and feel, and dancing is the only medium that gives me that, and is like a mirror. It always reflects everything about yourself. It connects me to my human side. I dance because it makes me human and I am an artist because dancing made me that. I can produce and feel movement while being surrounded by noises, silence, or any kind of external stimulus that is here and now.

I wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for dance. At the end of January 2021, I hit the rock bottom; I reached the deepest level of love pain and dancing saved me.

After coming back to work and trying to get my life back, I was thankful every day for being able to dance and be healed by this amazing art. It’s there, in that part of my life that I felt how lucky I was and never realised: I have been chosen, together with a few other people in the whole universe, to generate and transmit movement, feelings or anything that could make every heart beat stronger, every person a bit less sad or happier, and to make people feel more human in this crazy world that we are living in.

I just wish that the moment to stop dancing would never arrive —anybody knows a youth potion for me? 🙂

“

You can follow Andrea on his Instagram account: @andreasardegnapisano to keep up with his updates.

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Check out my photo book: Amsterdam Through the Seasons.