Antonella Usai is a dancer, performer, researcher and dance and yoga teacher. Her main field of research is the relationship between art and nature with a systemic vision. Initially trained at the Farco-Morra school in Turin, after winning numerous competitions, she began working with Italian and European dance theater companies as a dancer, choreographer and assistant director. Winner of a government scholarship, she graduated with honors from the Darpana Academy of Performing Arts in Ahmedabad in India. After her graduation she continued her training with the most renowned teachers of this discipline becoming, among other things, the first non-Indian dancer engaged by the prestigious Darpana Performing Group, performing in India and in South East Asia. Starting from her master’s degree in history of theater at the University of Turin, she continues to investigate how the percepiton of dance and its role, specifically that of Indian dance, has changed, with attention to decolonial thought. She is a member of TRA, the Artistic Research Table of Lavanderia a Vapore, and a consultant artist of Hangar Piemonte. She has collaborated with MAO since its inauguration as a performer and curator of innovative projects.
Sangeeta Isvaran is one of the most important Bharatanatyam artists, expert in the expressive art of Abhinaya as well as a research scholar and a social activist. She has been awarded with the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar, the highest national award for young dancers. She is founder of the Wind Dancers Trust, working in marginalized, underprivileged communities using the arts in education, empowerment and conflict resolution across 30 countries. She is a Fellow of the International Institute of Conciliation, USA, and an Honorary Associate of the Nature Conservation Foundation, India. Through her performances, lectures and workshops she expresses a forgotten truth about how we can relate to one another in a real and honest way.
In the period between 2022 and 2024, Antonella Usai took part in the artist residencies program activated by MAO. For her project, Usai has created a series of three videos with the performer Sangeeta Isvaran, in order to recreate the originale context that nuourishes the ancient Indian musical traditions, highlighting the relationship between performing and visual arts and between philosophical thought and body practice. Indian traditional dance, as the scholar Kapila Vatsyayana points out, represents a kind of “total art” in which not only theater and dance, but also literature, painting, sculpture and music come together. Through the use of the body, Sangeeta Isvaran proposes a new way of reading and narrating some of the works of art in the museum’s collection, revisiting ancestral themes, traditions and mythologies though a contemporary lense. The three videos that punctuate the exhibition route document part of the performative review DARBAR India in Dance hosted at MAO in 2014 and curated by Antonella Usai.
Watch the videos available in the museum's galleries and the video presentation in LIS (Italian Sign Language).
In 2025 Antonella Usai returned to the MAO with Aeras/Cercando Cieli, a performative installation emerged from the desire to honor the language of her father, the logudorese from which the Sardinian word Aeras (meaning 'air' or 'skies') derives, and to investigate the connection between body, memory and language from a decolonial perspective. The project intertwines Sardinian roots and Indian traditions, in particular the bharatanatyam theatre-dance, where the body is connected to the ritual gesture, the word to silence, the daily with the sacred.
The artist has worked both alone in the museum and with the public, sharing moments of dialogue through individual meetings in which body memories, gestures, everyday movements and rituals were explored together. These were followed by two collective meetings, fruitful moments of exchange and of mutual listening, in which personal experiences were intertwined in a choral dimension.
The final performance, sustained by these preliminary meetings, took place on September 21st, 2025, on the occasion of the autumn equinox, following the symbolic rhythm of the equinoxes that mark time on a ritual path through short joint actions repeated throughout the day.
