Giovanni Ortoleva — Can Can

CAN CAN is born from the meeting between director Giovanni Ortoleva and Irene Mantova, a performer whose epilepsy was diagnosed in 2023, at the age of twenty-five, after a lifetime of unexplainable “seizures.” The project intertwines Irene’s story with that of Jane Avril, the can-can dancer immortalized by Toulouse-Lautrec, who became famous precisely for the epilepsy she parodied in her dance.

A strange career, which began at the Salpêtrière hospital and ended on stages all over the world, mirrors that of a young contemporary performer. Drawing inspiration from their biographies and recalling the massive impact that epilepsy had at the end of the 19th century on actresses like Sarah Bernhardt, who replicated its poses in her acting, this work plays with the performative aspect of epileptic seizures, transforming them into choreographies that can be treated with varying degrees of realism and identification. The project brings movement and document together, drawing on heterogeneous materials such as Charcot’s photographs of the Salpêtrière patients and YouTube channels of people sharing their own seizures, questioning the very nature of these representations of the “sacred disease.” Irene interprets epilepsies: her own and those of others, moving between dance and parody, pathos and irony. CAN CAN is a playful meditation on suffering and interpretation.