MOVEMENT TORINO CELEBRATE A DECADE OF DANCE
15 December 2006 saw the official debut of Movement Torino, celebrating the Winter Olympics attended by 2,500 people.
In 2007 Movement expanded its artistic avenues and binds to Halloween Night, which involved 6,000 young people in attendance. The next year saw Movement increase its cultural program by starting a successful collaboration with the city’s prestigious Turin Polytechnic. In 2009 the festival expanded to 30 and 31 October, hosting over 20 international DJs, 25 hours of live music, projections digitali3D and more than 15,000 people in attendance. 2010 saw a real consecration as a festival of international importance with, amongst others, the Chemical Brothers performing. 2011 was the last year the festival took place at the PalaOlimpico-Isozaki and hosted Underworld together withLaurent Garnier, Carl Craig, Derrick May and Green Velvet.
In addition to the festival, over the year’s Movement Culture has also hosted events at prestigious locations around the city such as the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory, which has staged performances of Aufgang (2011), Brand Brauer Frick (2012), Bugge Wesseltof & Henrik Schwarz (2013), Juan Atkins & Moritz Von Oswald (2014) and Elektro Guzzi (2015), Turin Polytechnic, in collaboration with the Faculty of Engineering of Cinema and Media Communication, the Regional Museum of Natural Sciences, the Museum of Turin, Lumiq Studios, the Circle of Readers, the Museum of Savings, the Temporary Museum of BasicVillage.
With 2015 seeing Movement Torino celebrate a decade of music and culture, we got the lowdown from festival co-organizer Juni Vitale, who speaks on some of the event’s seminal moments, its philosophy, relation to Detroit, and more.
“Torino is always been compared to Detroit, considering the roots of the two cities in the automotive industry and in the underground cultural scene”
What was the very first aspect of, what would become, Movement Torino that occurred to make you know this was a festival you wanted and was able to put on?
Movement Torino Music Festival, was since really a vision and Gigi and myself had in mind from the very beginning to realize the best music format ever, the best music event we could ever attend.
What were your goals the first year of the festival?
The first edition come out by coincidence, a way to offer a pop celebration to the people for the closing of our 2006 Winter Olympics, having just met Derrick May and realizing about the greatness of Movement brand was inspiring for us.
That first year coincided with the end of the Winter Olympics. How would you describe the energy in the city of Torino throughout that period of time? Did you notice the Olympics energy spill over into Movement?
The Olympics were the 2 most entertaining and funny weeks of Torino since last World Exhibition of 1899. The city simply became internationally known, from Turin to Torino…Movement inaugurated the new way of big live electronic format in Italy.
How did your goal change to the second year? In the end did you develop a certain set of goals you wanted to meet each year in terms of artists, attendance, venues, workshops, etc…
Of course our business vision kept us wanting to increase the quality of our Festival. Each year we would try something new out and here we are, on our 10th Anniversary, having a week full of events: the Superga Bday – Opening Party (oct 24th), a workshop at Torino’s Polytechnic University, “Classical meets Contemporary” at Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory (oct 27th), Warm up (oct 30th), the Main Show at Lingotto Fiere on the 31st and then the Closing Party on the 1st.
Which artists would you describe as “friends of Movement Torino”? meaning…which artists have consistently been on the bill?
A lot of artists over the years have appreciated coming back to Movement and back to Torino, first of all Derrick May, Movement founder, our mentor and global ambassador. Others have been Ellen Allien, Richie Hawtin and many that will be come back for our Anniversary, such us Tale of Us, Chris Liebing, Dixon, Kerry Chandler and many many others.
