Performances at 7:30pm, 8pm, 8:30pm

As part of the ongoing exhibition Studio Systems, this collaborative project between artist/architect Bryony Roberts, current Academy Fellow, and dancer/choreographer Melissa Lohman, transforms the civic space of the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome. The center of civic authority in Rome for centuries, the Piazza del Campidoglio has taken shape as a political space through multiple architectural and urban renovations. Responding to the patterned ground of the Piazza—designed by Michelangelo but implemented by Mussolini—the project emphasizes and redirects its orchestration of public movement. Five female dancers orbit the piazza with two-meter long white rods, measuring, extending, and disrupting the lines of the pattern in a moving architectural drawing. Their movements play with and against the underlying order of the space, positioning female bodies in roles of drawing and ordering.

Roberts is a designer, artist and scholar. She combines strategies from architecture, visual art, and performance to produce transformations of existing buildings. She earned her BA from Yale University and her MArch from Princeton University, and started her own research and design practice in 2011. Her work has received a Graham Foundation Individual Grant and was featured in the Chicago Architecture Biennial of 2015, in addition to group and solo exhibitions in Rome, Berlin, Los Angeles, Houston, and New York. She has published her research in the journals Future Anterior, Log, and Architectural Record, coedited the volume Log 31: New Ancients, and recently edited a book titled Tabula Plena: Forms of Urban Preservation published by Lars Müller Publishers. She has taught at the Rice School of Architecture, SCI-Arc, and the Oslo School of Architecture and was awarded the Booth Family Rome Prize in History Preservation and Conservation to develop her work at the American Academy in Rome for the 2015–16 academic year.

Lohman is a performer and dancer from New York. She earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2000. She is trained in contemporary dance, ballet, Simonson technique, Afro-Caribbean dance, yoga, Noguchi taiso, and butoh dance. In 1995, she began performing as a performance artist, dancer and musician in New York City at venues such as the Knitting Factory, the Living Theater, UCB Theater, CBGB’s and Webster Hall. In 2004, she began training in butoh with Minako Seki and continued her training with Ko Murobushi, Yoshito Ohno, Tadashi Endo and Katsura Kan. From 2008 to 2010, she danced for and collaborated with Katsura Kan in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. She currently lives in Rome, Italy. Since 2010, she has brought her work as a solo performer to Teatro Furio Camillo, Teatro dell’Orologio and Teatroinscatola, Rome, Espace Culturel Bertin Poiree, Paris and La Lupa, Tuscania. In 2013 she co-founded the Rome based company Arcalòh with Flavio Arcangeli, with the support of poet/performer Marcello Sambati (Dark Camera). In 2014–15, the company was in residence at Rialto Sant’Ambrogio, Rome. Arcalòh created a site-specific performance for the festival "Apparizioni nei Giardini di Castel Sant'Angelo," Estate Romana, 2015.

This project is made possible by the Fellows’ Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

The exhibition Studio Systems is open Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 4pm to 7pm until 3 July 2016.