DOMESTIC HAIKU
A sensory performance by
ISA TRAVERSI


Concept and direction: Isa Traversi Music: Alberto Traversi. With: Antonella Albano, Domenico Di Cristo, Christian Fagetti, Denise Gazzo, Maria Celeste Losa, Sabrina Solcia (dancers of Teatro alla Scala); Federica Fracassi, Aurora Dal Maso (actresses); Ahmad Qatato (illustrator).

With the contribution of dancers, actors and ‘other’ presences tangibly close to the visitor—micro-dramaturgies have revealed the intimate spaces of the Porro home like real, free, and visionary haiku, where the lines and materiality of Porro furnishings were in dialogue with the bodies and emotional gesture.

“Just as the Haiku is a poetic form that captures the brevity of a moment and suggests an emotion, this performance offers an immersive perspective on Porro’s production through the tangible presence of the dancers’ bodies, music, and the fluid threshold of unexpected apparitions” - stated Isa Traversi, defining her choreography haiku in motion. 

“The encounter between design works and the audience generates sharing and community, physical and emotional participation, while music permeates objects, space, and the body, shaping the time of the encounter—captured in swift pencil portraits that blur the boundary between the self and the collective.

“Pizzini” are distributed to share the company’s philosophy, values, and history—texts written by renowned architects as well as by long-standing craftsmen—while visitors’ hands are physically guided into a direct, tactile understanding of the product.

On the large and welcoming sofa, a symbol of everyday life and intimate refuge, an actress offers—rare and precious gift—readings of fairy tales and poems to one visitor at a time… and design pieces become living matter for shared experience.

Movements, whispers, secret messages, and ephemeral drawings took shape as a poetic encounter between art and design that engaged the viewer in the emotional bond that can be formed with the domestic environment.

Poetic quotations from architects and designers who have collaborated with the brand enriched the scenography. Not only signatures from Porro, but also from the craftsmen who, with their hands or their thinking, have built “reimagining beauty” —with the constancy of love, the solidity of artisanal work, and a serious, passionate intellectual pursuit, attentive even to the most intimate needs.

Isa Traversi
A dancer, choreographer, and director from Milan, she studied dance at Teatro alla Scala and, from a young age, pursued research paths, collaborating with artists from diverse backgrounds.
She made her debut before the age of twenty in opera theatre at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, working with Luca Ronconi and Zubin Mehta in Wagner’s Rheingold. She later founded the Scuola Laboratorio Danza in Como, a center for pedagogical and theatrical experimentation, where for several decades she has conducted her own research on the syncretism of the arts through dance. Within this context, in the 1990s she created the theatre-dance group Kitchen.
Long engaged in creating choreography for both opera and spoken theatre, she consistently works on interdisciplinary projects: site-specific dramaturgies, urban choreographic events, and performances for art, architecture, design, cinema, and fashion. She creates events for the cultural sector. In 2024, she wrote and directed the documentary Senectus Open.
She conducts seminars, training courses, and masterclasses on the performing body and on participatory approaches to experiencing art.
Design is not born to decorate; it understands and responds to the real needs of people: its aim is to foster well-being… to enable living well, in peace and beauty.
Artists and audience become members of the same community, forming together an expanded work, where the boundaries of the showroom dissolve into life.”

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