NoGravity Theatre

Thursday, January 21, 2027

Doors 6:30pm, Show 7:30pm · Tennessee Williams Theatre

One of Italy’s most inventive performing arts companies makes a stop in Key West this January. NoGravity was founded in Rome in 2005 by artist Emiliano Pellisari, and it has spent two decades building a form of theater that doesn’t fit neatly into any existing category — part dance, part visual art, part outright illusion. Bodies appear to float, fall upward, and dissolve into one another. The mechanics behind it are never explained and, honestly, are better left unexplained.

The company draws its imagery from the Italian Renaissance and Baroque, translating the compositions of old master painting into moving bodies on a darkened stage. The result is dreamlike rather than technical — surreal tableaux that assemble, hold for a beat, and come apart. Since 2010 the dance cast has been led by Mariana Porceddu, a graduate of the National Academy of Dance who became co-author of the company’s choreography in 2012.

NoGravity performs annually in major Italian theaters and tours internationally with support from Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage. This is the kind of production that rarely makes it this far south, and it’s worth seeing on a proper stage rather than in a clip.