Wanda Moretti

Wanda Moretti is an Italian choreographer and researcher whose work centers on proportion, spatial harmony and the influence of built environments on human movement. After studying contemporary dance, she began experimenting independently with the vertical plane in the 1990s, a shift that transformed the wall from scenery into an active working surface and made the location of a rope's anchor point a choreographic decision.

In 1994 Moretti and saxophonist-composer Marco Castelli founded Compagnia Il Posto in Venice. Their collaboration joined suspended bodies with live and electronic music, establishing an ensemble model in which dancers, rigging, architecture and sound are composed together. Il Posto became the principal vehicle for Moretti's performances at festivals and civic events in Italy and internationally.

Moretti developed a specialized pedagogy known as Vertical and Suspension Training (VST). The method addresses the altered alignment, force and orientation created when a harnessed dancer uses a wall as a floor, treating safety and technical preparation as foundations for expressive choice rather than invisible backstage concerns. Around 2000, she intensified her focus on site-specific work in historic buildings and museums. These projects responded to architectural proportions, cultural memory, surface, height and public sightlines—they did not simply transpose repertory onto a façade. Her broader educational practice included museum workshops and a long-running dance-education project with women in a Venice prison.

Moretti helped found the Vertical Dance Forum, a network of European and Canadian companies supported through the European Union's Creative Europe program from 2017 to 2019. Her research project *The Routes of Vertical Dance* documented the form's first generation and examined the relationship among vertical dance, aerial practice, climbing and site-specific performance. In 2022 Moretti and Welsh choreographer-researcher Kate Lawrence published *Vertical Dance: Perceiving and Creating Space*, formalizing a field history and vocabulary after decades in which practitioners had developed methods in parallel. Moretti continues to create for Il Posto and to research how places influence movement, extending her work from performance-making into historiography and transmission.