Composition | Performance | MK Company
Smoking Rooms is the new creation of the mk company, choreographed by Michele Di Stefano — a collaboration with Lorenzo Bianchi Hoesch that now spans nearly twenty years.
The piece starts from the places where we wait: spaces that force strangers into close proximity, like the smoking room missing from a São Paulo skyscraper, where life unfolds entirely indoors. Six performers continuously enter and leave the stage, forming temporary communities in a suspended, almost aquatic atmosphere.
The original score, composed specifically for the piece, moves between enveloping, dreamlike atmospheres and sharp, rhythmically driven fragments. Low and high frequencies intertwine with fragments drawn from the “unfinished” works of classical music — Schubert, Beethoven, Schönberg, Debussy — and with Richard Strauss’s Im Abendrot.
After previews at Operaestate Festival in Bassano del Grappa, Fuori Programma in Rome and Festival Danza Estate in Bergamo, Smoking Rooms premiered at Torinodanza Festival on September 23, 2026, and is now preparing for its 2027 tour.
