Community of Bologna

Opening, listening, connecting. A soft time of shared practice to approach, meet the other, reveal and infect each other with confidence and fun. To assist and participate in the birth of a community that knows how to bring energy from the dance hall to any place.

Inclusion, freedom, lightness, fluidity, warmth, hands, eyes, skin, wind, leaves… and above all great affection and gratitude. And this is only a part of what I carry with me after this long time we spent together. Always beautiful and welcoming community: a mix of knowledge and thankfulness, memory.

Performing Gender was like melting and realising that the more I melted the more I wanted to melt again. Now I feel part of this big body that moves, feels, listens, speaks with every possible nuance and is always looking for new colours. How wonderful to have found a space to simply be, together!

The acquired practices, relationships and moments of confrontation generated by this project are tools and memories that I have literally incorporated and will carry with me everywhere.

I started out to seize an opportunity. I did not expect this to become the safe place where I know, express and challenge myself as I build relationships and participate in community and beauty.

This experience has allowed me to contribute to the creation of a community whose foundations have always been listening, respect and kindness, characteristics that have determined in the whole group a strong sense of belonging, which has kept us together and increasingly bonded* for about two years now. Weeks may go by without meeting, but getting together is always a bit like coming home: our community is a place where we are free* to be as we are.

I believe that in Performing Gender - Dancing in Your Shoes correspondences of gentle humanity, of stubborn professionalism, of fluid lightness were born. If I were asked to tell this story through an image, I would represent it with an embrace made of hands in each other.

I bring with me an experience of community and horizontal dance, an attentive, physical and nurturing sociability, essential in the pandemic and post-pandemic period. In the most productive phase of the project, I learn to develop a movement that is sincere, honest and consistent with what I feel and represent.

I felt welcomed and stimulated by the people in the group as well as the artists who led the workshops. I had the opportunity to feel, perceive, listen, share, have fun, learn, play, reflect, question myself, step out of my comfort zone, feel understood, make connections and so much more that perhaps I still cannot verbalise.