This small reflection on lightness unfolds within the geography of a child’s play.
With the grace of a young deer, his body inquires into the nature of things with poetic simplicity. In the delicate interplay between his body and the larger form of a dancer, where the poetry of movement and gesture intertwines with an exploration of human fragility, the spectator glimpses, as Calvin suggested, that the vivacity and mobility of intelligence defy the constraints of gravity.

Concept and Choreo: Francesca Cola
Performance: Tommaso Serratore and Tommaso Borin
Sound: Davide Tomat, Sufjan Stevens, Akron Family
Production: Associazione Didee Arti e Comunicazione.
This project, part of the Platform New Bodies, New Perspectives in contemporary community dance, is supported by MIBACT (2015-2017). It is backed by Zerogrammi and the Pimeonte dal vivo Foundation, and has won the Permutazioni 2016 and Artist in residence 2016 awards. Promoted internationally by Festa Danzante Canton Ticino and Festival Des Artes et Des Cinés – Saint Etienne.

A Stone and a Child. An Imaginary Playground.

A child, through play, experiences the nature of things, the weight his body can support, and how he himself can be supported by the concentrated mass of a stone. The child’s body and mind work in a particular, poetic, and unexpected way. Their creative responses to stimuli find, through the choreographer’s intuition, a welcome and a response in the body and movements of the adult dancer. Thus, an encounter is born, marked by poetic lines, a secret and mysterious dialogue about the law of gravity, the alternation of weight and lightness. The bodily discourse between the two weaves a script made up of variations: taking and letting go, resisting and surrendering, giving oneself fully and leaving space and time for emptiness, play. The bodily trace is clean, light, yet dense with a high symbolic value. Together, the bodies create traces capable of speaking to adults and children alike, evoking the words of Italo Calvino. “When the human realm seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus to another space. I’m not talking about escaping into dreams or the irrational. I mean I have to change my approach, I have to look at the world with a different perspective, a different logic, other methods of knowledge and verification.” Thus, the spectator experiences visually and emotionally the reasons for lightness, supported by the simple and light logic of a child’s mind and body (another method of knowledge).

The project, “I will support the reasons for lightness,” was born during a multi-year workshop on the global nature of languages led by the dancer, therapist, and choreographer Francesca Cola at the small elementary school of Colleretto Castelnuovo in the province of Turin. The pedagogical methodology used proposes the integrated use of body/movement, sound, and image. This open methodology, attentive to the needs of children, promotes their ability to make these different language areas dialogue with each other in a fluid and conscious manner. For this reason, the project presents a dramatic choice that is intelligible and not self-referential. Indeed, precisely because it was born within the context of an experimental school laboratory and conducted according to a method that includes the choreographer’s artistic background and her specialization in dance-movement therapy, the project has a profound pedagogical cut that has been thoroughly studied and experimented with for eight consecutive years of work. The proposed theme, born from observing children playing with a large stone proposed by the conductor to make them experience the dynamics of weight-support-release and the concrete perception of what concentration (concentrated mass) is, is able to stimulate considerations and proactive attitudes both on a purely physical level and on the level of symbolic reflection.

For all these reasons, the project presents itself as a small consideration on the theme of lightness, stimulating the reflections and emotions of the public on a theme that unites every human being.

The project involves actions to engage the local, national, and international community (Turin and province, Puglia, Canton Ticino, and France) through the distribution of the work along with a workshop on the theme of weight and lightness in all their physical and symbolic aspects. The workshop is open to children, adults, and the elderly, with particular attention paid to dialogue and intergenerational transmission.