I met Lindsay Kemp for the first time in 2015. He was in Rome with his show Reinventions and Reincarnations and I was asked to photograph his performance. You can find some images of that incredible night on the Repubblica XL website.

Few months later, I decided to contact him as I was mulling the idea to portray him in his daily routine. I wanted to document the everyday life of an extraordinary man, one of the greatest dancers and choreographers of all times.

He invited me in Livorno, the city he chose to live and work. He was going to travel to Rome in the following days and I thought that joining him in that journey could have been a good idea. So we took a train with the Lindsay Kemp Company from Livorno to Rome in the hot Italian summer.

Being a dancer, Kemp communicates a lot with his body: this can sound very tempting for a photographer, but dangerous as well. I wanted to avoid poses (but sometimes I couldn’t resist), believing that extraordinariness can be hidden and recognised in how you smile or in the way you walk or sit: spontaneous gestures can be revealing.

So what makes a person extraordinary?

These images are an attempt to answer this question by using photography to unveil this secret.