Alessandro el Bascioni, an international dancer, choreographer and teacher based in London, has trained and specialised in Hilal Dance® for over 10 years. His earlier training has been in North African dance. He has also researched different forms which lead him to discover Hilal Dance in 1996. In recent years he has toured extensively with the Hilal Dance Company in major productions including Al Janub (2001) and Aseel (2004) with which he began his collaboration with the international artist and founder Suraya Hilal.

In 2005 he set up and launched is own Iskandar Dance Company, with the premier of his new work El Saqiyeh (The Waterwheel) in the Tanzhaus nwr Düsseldorf in March 2006.

The Company has toured also at the Kulturhaus, Switzerland in the same month and Dance Base (The Scotland’s Centre for Dance) in the Edinburgh Festival in August 2006. The Company are due to perform again on the 18th of November at the International Dance Festival in Kulturzentrum-Tempel.

Alessandro’s work conveys purity of movement, live rhythm and music with dramatic content and complexities without superfluous elements added to it. The Music, and rhythm, is intrinsically connected to the musicality of the body and its movements showing the dance at its core, a culture tradition reinterpreted as an integrated contemporary expression.

Press Quotes

“There is a meditative subtlety in what the choreographer Alessandro el Bascioni and his fellow dancers achieve with their slow undulating movements - the spiralling turns that cause their long silken robes to bell out as if caught by passing breeze on the Nile. El Saqiyeh (it translates as the Waterwheel) is like an oasis of restorative calm”

(The Herald)

“It was the sense of freedom which ran through Iskandar Dance Company’s beautiful El Saqiyeh…Three dancers breeze onto the stage, dancing in unison, encircling one another, weaving in and out…giving a wonderful sense of harmony between costume, dance and music”

(Ballet Magazine)

“El Saqiyeh is slow and flowing. The dancers have a soft, bouncy weight as they take small galloping steps, their jiggling shoulders and upheld arms light and calm as their silken skirts whirl around their ankles” (The Stage)

"A compelling performance" (Dusseldorfer kulturen)

Scarica il pdf sulla Iskandar Dance Company (in inglese)