Chaòsia: the void and the city
Community Dance
a project by Danila Blasi, Manuela Cirfera, Enrica Felici, Giordano Novielli and Francesca Schipani | curatorship Enrica Felici and Francesca Schipani | artistic consultancy Danila Blasi | with the participants in the Community Dance workshop, Latina | a co-production PinDoc – Rosa Shocking/Festival Tendance
(…) and it seems to us that something is closer,
that something is coming towards us
and will arrive in its own time.
We do not know its name,
we call it encounter.
(The Reasons for Anger, Cortàzar)
Chaòsia, the void and the city is a community dance workshop that aims to construct, by experimenting with new configurations, an imaginary city — Chaòsia — in which empty space sheds its fear of nothingness and becomes a bridge, creating passages between one fullness and another.
The traversal begins with an explicit literary suggestion: Chaosia is the fifty-sixth of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, as if the last page of that book, that endpoint, were to mutate and become a vessel charting a course towards our place to inhabit. A place of bridges and relations, of minglings and attempted equilibria, of equivalences and interpenetrations — between self and other, between void and fullness, between noise and silence, between distant and near, between fear and abandonment to the pleasure of possibilities. A place in which there exists not a single, already full and self-complete centre that draws towards itself, as keeper of apparent importance or presumed truth, but rather a polycentricity composed of the complex wholeness of every human being, sustained by that void which grants a margin of choice to sight, to intentions, to desire, and which supports the slow search for communicative tools.
In the western world there is no communication other than the word, says Roland Barthes. Looking further east, however, the empire of signifiers, by its very vastness, so greatly exceeds the word that the exchange of signs becomes, through its beauty and mobility, communicatively necessary and clear, in spite of the opacity of language. Not only the voice, then, but the entire body narrates itself, making itself known in a more expansive time and unfolding its text.
The long-experienced horror vacui here clears the path for the void, which becomes a necessary space — just as between word and word, between number and number, between note and note, between voice and voice, so too between body and body. In this shift of thought and action, we are supported by the philosophical concept of Ma, rich in meanings: Ma is interval, pause, void between two structural elements. Above all, it is passage and place in which desire manifests itself. Already in the character of Ma — a closed door with cracks through which sunlight filters — the meaning of the image is described and enacted: through the limited frame of an ordinary opening, the world, expanded to infinity, reaches us by means of light.
Workshop structure
The Chaòsia, the void and the city workshop will give rise to a community dance performance taking place in Latina within the framework of Festival Tendance 2023.
Participants will begin from the concept of fullness (space full of bodies, full of voices, full of sounds) in order to experiment with a kind of diaspora, in which the space will expand and each person can elaborate a new individual language, measuring themselves and measuring the void that separates them from others. Separation becomes a necessary action for connection. Through the void, each person’s visual field opens up, the horizon recedes. Many small centres, as in an archipelago of bodies and narratives, scrutinise one another from the breadth afforded, narrate themselves driven by the desire for the encounter that will generate bond. A series of threads — coloured traces between island and island. The space for observation allows the choice to draw closer to mature, accentuating the complementarity of proximity and distance.
Yet whereas in the Ersilia of Calvino’s travels a web grown too dense becomes a wall, blocks passage and even the air and forces one to move further away, to a new empty space to be filled once more and then moved from again — in our Chaòsia, the threads respect the void, leave it space, are ephemeral yet present; communication, ever shifting and respectful of each one’s language, creates the most stable equilibrium by delighting in the dance between opposites.
The inhabitants of Chaòsia do not overlap, do not cause the void to overflow with fullness. They allow themselves the freedom of a measured distance. And so they see one another, listen to one another, respect one another, choose one another.
And so they love one another.
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.