Bonifica
Community Dance
choreography Giovanna Velardi | choreographic materials curated by Federica Aloisio, Zoe Bernabeu, Lorenzo Covello, Giuseppe Muscarello, Silvia Oteri, Francesca Schipani, Valeria Zampardi | dramaturgical consultancy Danila Blasi, Theodor Rawyler | musical coordination Rodolfo Rossi | transmission of gesture Francesca Schipani | production PinDoc | coproduction Festival TenDance 2019 | with the support of MiC, Regione Siciliana | in collaboration with Department of Cultural Policies, Sport and Tourism, Latina – Department of Welfare Policies and Equal Opportunities, Latina – Department for the International City, Youth Policies, Participation and Smart City, Latina – Observatory of Social Promotion Associations of the Municipality of Latina – State Conservatory of Music “Ottorino Respighi”, Latina – State Art Lyceum of Latina – Lievito – new explorations in the world of arts and knowledge, Latina – Museum of Contemporary Art MADXI, Latina – Socio-Cultural Centre for the Elderly V. Veneto, Latina – OperaPrima Teatro, Latina
We come from Rome. Or rather, some of us come from other places and then moved to Rome — like Theo, for instance, who, before coming from Rome, came from Biel, in Switzerland, but now comes from Rome. So, as we were saying, we come from Rome and we work for this contemporary dance festival, Tendance, in Latina. And over these years working in Latina, we have got to know other people who, from other places, come to work in Latina. Some every day, others only a few days a week or a month. We have met young people who come to study here — at the art lyceum, for example, or at the music conservatory. And, still others, people who have moved here for the most varied reasons: some for opportunity, others out of necessity, others yet for love.
Cities are like this: an ensemble of people in continuous movement who meet one another and, together, constitute a community. And every city has its origins in the same way: in a place previously uninhabited, people begin to live. Then others arrive, and others still. And cities grow and grow and grow. Then some people leave and go to populate other places and, perhaps, found other cities. Much like that Trojan named Aeneas did, many years ago. Because, as we know, women and men are migratory souls, from the dawn of time.
Community Dance
Community Dance is an inclusive language that celebrates dance as a right for everyone. Moving beyond the dictates of technique and a purely therapeutic approach, it places individual freedom at its core — in the pursuit of bodily awareness and all its expressive possibilities, through creativity. In a shared space, movement becomes a tool for finding an alternative form of communication to the spoken word, transforming each person’s peculiarities and differences into collective resources, and the pleasure of dancing into an experience of profound democracy and social belonging. The associations PinDoc and Rosa Shocking, through the experience, work, and great artistic sensibility of Theodor Rawyler and, after his passing, of his collaborators, have always been active in the social sphere and on the local territory through Community Dance workshop activities across a range of contexts, promoting a research practice that transcends traditional aesthetic and technical canons, seeking a dance that is possible in every context — one in which the lived experience, the body, and the active listening of participants become essential elements for a shared dance open to the participatory gaze of an audience. In its very name, community dance understands dance as a fundamental expressive language for the purposes of inclusion, capable of engaging all the people who constitute a community or who share its challenges and characteristics. By offering ample space to the personal, corporeal, and mental sphere, it promotes expressive movement awareness, coordination, and the development of creativity, rather than the acquisition of pre-established movement codes, within a methodological perspective that is experiential rather than technical-executory in nature. Dance thus becomes the art of using and organising one’s own body and movement to express, communicate, and invent — developing intuition and imagination through the exploration of creative solutions. If corporeality is considered the origin of all our cognitive, sensory, and emotional experience, the body constitutes the pedagogical device capable of opening different communicative channels; communication, from this perspective, may not require words, since every movement, gesture, or act offers new possibilities of existential meaning: attention is not paid to performative or muscular ability, nor to age, agility, strength, or flexibility, but to acting and interacting with others.
Since 2019, within the Tendance festival, the following workshops have taken shape, with urban artistic presentations: Bonifica, Sakura, Barramundi, Quello che resta, Chaosia: il vuoto e la città, Poppy seeds. Scritto sul corpo is instead a longer work conceived for a theatrical space, and was performed at the Teatro Biblioteca il Quarticciolo on 25 September 2025.