Dante’s Inferno
Contemporary circus / work in progress
Creation and performance: Anastasia Evsigneeva & Lorenzo Serafino
Contortion, hair suspension, contemporary dance
Vices Versus Virtues & Vice Versa is an ongoing contemporary circus research by Anastasia Evsigneeva and Lorenzo Serafino, loosely rooted in the moral architecture of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno.
Rather than retelling Dante’s journey through Hell, the work asks whether his centuries-old taxonomy of human vice can be translated into the body.
“What does desire look like before thought intervenes?
How does violence reorganize a body?
And if our surroundings continuously act upon us, how much agency do we really have over who we become?”
At the centre of the research stands a custom-built chair, 6.1 feet high. Three metal hoops encircle its legs, transforming the object into both circus apparatus and vertical landscape. Each hoop corresponds to one of Dante’s broader categories of sin: Incontinence, Violence/Bestiality, and Fraud/Malice.
The performers move upward through these territories, while their relationship to each other gets reestablished depending on the new achieved height, the depth of Hell.
“The higher they climb, the more conscious their actions become.”
A physical anatomy of Hell
In the lowest circle, Incontinence, the body is governed by appetite.
Movement swings, spirals and circles. Momentum overtakes intention. The performers continually lose and recover their axes; movement begins in the extremities: hands and feet are leading the way while the head seems to arrive afterwards. Here, the body acts before it thinks.
As the performers enter Violence/Bestiality, intention appears.
The movement becomes direct, sharp and obstructive. Bodies deliberately enter one another’s pathways. Limbs become armour and, at times, weapons. The relationship shifts from being carried by impulse to consciously exerting force upon oneself or another.
At the highest circle, Fraud/Malice, physical violence gives way to strategy.
Movement becomes measured. Gestures acquire double meanings. A smile may accompany betrayal; tenderness may conceal an attempt to gain advantage. Anastasia and Lorenzo negotiate for the highest position on the chair, seemingly cooperating while quietly undermining one another.
In this world, the body is no longer without control. It knows exactly what it is doing.
The progression from Incontinence through Violence to Fraud therefore creates an unsettling reversal: consciousness itself does not necessarily make us virtuous. The capacity to reason can equally become the capacity to manipulate.
Hair suspension enters this landscape as both circus technique and dramaturgical image when Anastasia claims the chair top, and Lorenzo gets stuck in hair suspension under the chair. The suspended body recalls Dante’s forest of suicides: a human figure caught between agency and surrender, struggling against an environment from which there appears to be no clean escape.
The chair as a third body
The chair is not simply an apparatus upon which circus skills are performed. It determines relational dynamics, hierarchy and the Hell itself.
A body can disappear beneath it, become trapped within it, hang from it or claim its summit. Contortion alters the apparent anatomy of the performers as they negotiate its architecture; hair suspension makes gravity visible; moments of extreme physical control coexist with instability of identity and values.
The apparatus consequently becomes something between architecture, landscape and character, a Hell constructed by human bodies, but also a structure capable of changing the people who enter it.
This relationship has led the research toward another question:
“Do we create our environment, or does our environment eventually create us?”
An unfinished descent
The first research phase took place in January 2026 through approximately fifteen hours of independent studio research by Evsigneeva and Serafino. It resulted in an initial 18-minute duet and established the physical and conceptual vocabulary that continues to guide the work.
Anastasia and Lorenzo have begun conversations with circus artists Anna Protsiou and Amy Goh about expanding the duet into a quartet. In this future iteration, the additional bodies would not simply become two more characters. They would begin to embody Hell itself: the snakes, the Wood of the Harpies, and other shifting environmental forces that tempt, obstruct and alter the central pair.
Their presence would allow the research to move beyond the morality of individual action toward the influence of context: how behaviour changes according to the world surrounding us, and where personal responsibility begins and ends.
Development of the quartet is currently paused due to insufficient project funding. The duet remains an active work in progress, while the artists continue to seek the resources necessary to undertake the next stage of research.
There is no attempt to offer a definitive answer to Dante’s moral universe. Instead, Vices Versus Virtues & Vice Versa uses it as a choreographic proposition: a structure through which contortion, suspension, gravity, desire and human relationships can be examined.
“Hell, in this work, is not necessarily a place one arrives at after death.
It may be something we construct between ourselves.”