Any historian will tell you that without the past, we can’t understand ourselves. The same is true of the arts. While contemporary culture is interesting in all its various manifestations, even the most experimental or cutting-edge forms of culture did not come out of nothing. But not all art forms have made it into the present intact. Some forms disappear as the tools, customs, and social contexts they require have fallen away.
Thankfully, a slew of artists today are turning to these endangered or forgotten forms of art and injecting new life into them.
One such artist is choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni, a Montgomery Fellow and Leslie Center for the Humanities Institute visitor who has brought his project Save the Last Dance for Me to the Hopkins Center for the Arts this spring. Although he received one of the most prestigious honors in the field, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Dance by the Venice Biennale in 2019, Sciarroni considers himself to be an artist, engaged very deeply with questions around movement and origin.
“Much of his work takes its starting point from an old or ancient practice, in some cases, on the verge of extinction,” says Michael Wyatt, a resident scholar in the Comparative Literature Program. “In a sense, Sciarroni’s work is conceived as a process of translating from one form, at a specific historical moment or place, into another.”
Like any good translation, it is never literal; Sciarroni often injects his own creative DNA into each project.
Save the Last Dance for Me draws from a fast-paced social dance performed between men in communities outside Bologna, Italy. The steps require an enormous amount of attention and concentration from the two dancers. By the time Sciarroni encountered it, the dance was no longer being performed at any social occasions, but survived only in the memory of a few older people who had danced it. He spent time in these communities and over time, they helped him to learn the steps.
“By doing that, and by spending time with them, he entered into the culture in which this dance had been created, and which existed for 70 or 80 years,” says Wyatt. “He transformed it, he translated it into something very much his own.”
A similar process of translation unfolds in music. Acclaimed pianist and Leslie Center Humanities Institute visitor Francesco Libetta has long engaged with the layered histories embedded in classical repertoire. At the age of 21, he performed Leopold Godowsky’s 53 Studies on Chopin’s Études in Milan Conservatory’s principal hall—a formidable undertaking that garnered him critical acclaim.
Frédéric Chopin’s etudes were written to help young pianists develop the dexterity required for increasingly complex 19th-century piano compositions. A hundred years after Chopin, Godowsky revisited these works, responding to Chopin’s original pieces as well as to the evolution of the piano as an instrument. His studies place more technical emphasis on the left hand—up until Beethoven, most piano literature was written for the right hand—in his 260 pages of complicated piano music.
Now largely overlooked, Godowsky’s cycle can be seen as a translation of Chopin’s etudes. At the Hop, Libetta will present Chopin’s original works alongside Godowsky’s intricate reimaginings using the instruments for which they were written.
He will perform on both a French 19th-century piano and a modern Steinway. His solo piano recital takes place at the Hop’s Morris Recital Hall on Tuesday, May 5, at 7 p.m., and Wednesday, May 6, at 8 p.m., in partnership with the Leslie Center for the Humanities and the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards.
Essentially, the program presents a translation side by side with its source, as interpreted by Libetta, a third layer in an ongoing dialogue across time.
Artistic translations can also cross national boundaries. The New England-based Tenores de Aterúe, who performed at the Hop last spring, is the only ensemble outside of Sardinia dedicated to singing cantu a tenore, a distinctive form of Sardinian folk singing characterized by guttural singing, intricate overtones and impeccable rhythmic precision. After performing casually, they went viral and were invited to perform in Sardinia itself, where the tradition originates.
Across these different practices, artists have engaged other art forms through reinterpretation or translation. Audiences, too, seem to respond to this. Whether it is the opportunity to encounter unfamiliar aesthetics, to glimpse different ways of life or to recognize connections across time and place, these works offer something that contemporary forms alone cannot.
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This article originally appeared in the spring/summer 2026 issue of Hop Fwd.
