[NoHo Arts District, CA] – By special invitation, after winning the Hollywood Fringe Exchange Award, Annalisa Limardi’s NO will have its US premiere at the Hollywood Fringe Festival 2025.
About NO
NO is a performance that explores the difficulty of defining one’s personal and intimate boundaries. On stage, a performer faces the demands of the outside world, embodied by a microphone—a symbol, a medium, and an amplifier of speech—but she is also its victim. The microphone turns questions into demands that expect no answer, harassing her both verbally and physically. She finds the strength to act the moment she allows herself to rebel, taking control of it, and becoming a subject who makes her voice heard.
This performance was born out of the need to process wounds related to experiences of abuse, where my personal boundaries were crossed without my ability to defend myself. However, it also explores the inherent difficulty I have in recognizing and establishing those boundaries.
NO is what I often wished I had said but didn’t—perhaps out of shame, fear, recklessness, or naivety. It is deeply personal to me, yet I feel it speaks to a broader, more universal issue. Or rather, let’s call it a gendered issue. Because I believe that the roots of this fear of raising our voices, this need to be obedient and devoted in order to be accepted, are deeply social and weigh most heavily on women.
Accolades
“The performance is nothing less than spellbinding. Limardi’s physicality is outstanding, as she weaves, twists, acquiesces and strikes out. Her visible exhaustion is allegorical to her mental turmoil. The rhythmic disco beat pounding out encapsulates the plethora of pressures to which she is subjected. The fluidity of her movement is striking and her timing perfection.” – NO: 5 Star Review by Roger Kay for Broadway Baby
Read the full review here, https://broadwaybaby.com/shows/no/817136
The Team
Creator and performer Annalisa Limardi
Sound Design: Saverology
External Eye: Penelope Morout
English translation: Aldo Vittorio Grassi
With the support of Centro Servizi Culturali S. Chiara, AriaTeatro ETS, Pergine Festival, Tuttoteatro.com
About the Artist
Annalisa Limardi is an Italian performer and author whose work explores the intersection of movement, language, and sound. She began her artistic journey at the Contemporary Dance Course of the Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi in Milan, where she immersed herself in a range of techniques and developed a personal approach to movement through in-depth physical research.
After graduating in 2018, she moved to Florence to pursue acting, enrolling in the two-year Orazio Costa Acting Course at Teatro della Pergola. Since 2020, she has worked professionally as an actress, performing on various stages across Italy.
Alongside her work as a performer, Limardi developed a growing interest in authorship, which led her to create her first original work, No, in 2024. This multidisciplinary piece combines contemporary dance, rhymed text, and the interplay between recorded voice and electronic music. No has been met with critical acclaim and has received several awards both in Italy and abroad, including the Hollywood Fringe Exchange Award.
Her artistic research focuses on the structural dynamics of power in society, with particular attention to the condition of the feminine. Through her work, she seeks to challenge dominant narratives and create new spaces for reflection and expression.
Awards
– Hollywood Fringe Exchange Award – invited to perform in Hollywood, June 2025
– Special Mention at the Prague Fringe Festival – “For Most Innovative Show”
– Special Mention at the Avignon Fringe Festival
– Valentina Nicosia Fund Award for Emerging Artist
– Claudia Lombardi Foundation for Theatre Awards (Lugano)
– Invitation to Toplocentrala – Centre for Contemporary Arts, Sofia (Bulgaria)
– Winner of the Non Addomesticabili 2024 Grant
– Audience Award of the 2024 Tuttoteatro.com Dante Cappelletti Prize
Press / Awards
Finalist Festival Teatri Riflessi 2024, for which it wins:
– “Valentina Nicosia” Fund Award for emerging artist
– Claudia Lombardi Foundation Award
– Winner of Bando NON ADDOMESTICABILI 2024
(Centro Santa Chiara di Trento, ariaTeatro ETS, Pergine Festival) Mention of the popular jury of the Tuttoteatro.com “Dante Cappelletti” Award 2023, led by Fabrizio Pallara ed Enoch Marrella:
“For investigating with a plurality of languages her own sometimes desperate urgency and for forcing us to be there with her.
For the courage, effectiveness and maturity of expressive language. For creating empathy of a universal kind in relation to the specific condition of the feminine in a clear generational cross-section. And finally for embodying the paradoxical co-presence of the yes in the no and the no in the yes, in empty space, as a moving point.”
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