The Surprised body project is a dance piece that focus on choreographic and compositional issues and sees the body and the movement as its central element. The project has been developing, as an ongoing creative process, by creating several new versions of the work while touring in different countries, sometimes also involving guest dancers and new composers to participate in the performance.
Since its première in Buenos Aires, in October 2010, the project has been successfully presented in 27 countries in Europe, Asia and South America.

Dance company Wee never ceases to fascinate
Gry Kipperberg, who established together with choreographer Francesco Scavetta the dance company Wee, opens the show with a solo that makes you think of clouds of light floating across the sky. She has an effortless motion. She lets flow the movement as quickly and gently while she shapes it. And, as the clouds, she finds continuously new moves. She is not alone in this. The seven dancers, representing almost as many countries, is a unified organism, which through their movements, almost as strange note, characters or birds in flight, creates countless rooms in the room.
Choreographer Scavetta has always the subtle ability to pull the strings and find the simple (not uncomplicated) expression to show itself again, and here in a distinctly pure dance language. The effect that provides is subtle and fascinating.
Inger-Margrethe Lunde – Aftenposten

Already as a title, Surprised body project defines a metaphorical space. The image of a body in a constant alert, escaping from a habitual daily body and from any kind of routine. The sense of “surprise” is intended as the inner state that allows to be constantly ready to “react” and respond, as individual and as a group. To affect each other, by any physical decision, also throughout structured improvisations and instant composition.

“When you “affect” something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn." (Brian Massumi)
We challenged and intensified the body awareness, by approaching the movement avoiding tactics and routines. The goal, or better, a sort of utopia, has been the scornful athleticism, the absurd acrobatics of a body in balance, that state of precariousness, not only physical, in which one might fall at any moment, even if this will not happen. A constant tension between falling and regaining balance.

A movement which does not show itself, but which happens.
A disjointed body manipulation, a concentrate of fluidity and deformation, humour and folly.

The initial process took its starting point in experiences made within the cycle of workshops, called “A surprised body”, that Francesco Scavetta has been holding in the lasts years, in 42 countries (Italy, Switzerland, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Albania, Republic of San Marino, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, UK, Holland, Austria, Finland, India, Belgium, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Spain, France, Germany, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Palestine, Lebanon, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, Senegal, Kenya, Uganda and Belarus).

In 2013-2014, we created five different new productions, in collaboration with dance artists and artistic structures in five countries: PLATFORMA from Moscow (Russia); Reykjavik Dance Atelier and Reykjavik Dance Festival, in Iceland; Studio-Contemporary Dance Company from Zagreb (Croatia); Plesni Teater from Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Monochrome circus/Kyoto Art Center-Kyoto (Japan).
The version created in Zagreb won the Price for Best Performance of the Year in 2014.
The most recent version has been created in co-production with Greenwich Dance in London (UK). The piece premiered in June 2016 within Greenwich Dances Festival (London) and was, later on, presented at Live Art Festival in Strømstad (Sweden) and at IX International Festival Danza en la Ciudad, Bogotà (Colombia).

The music of the first version has been composed by Jon Balke and played live by the percussion ensemble Batagraf that includes Snorre Bjerck and Ingar Zach/Helge Norbakken. The musical concept is a collection of flexible material for percussion and electronics. Musically the project will look at rhythm, not in the sense of layers, as in rhythmic music, but more towards the rhythm of language. That is: rhythm in shorter sequences, phrases or events that break up and combine into chains of “statements”.