Poppy Seeds
Community Dance
Urban Community Dance Performance
curated by Enrica Felici and Francesca Schipani – PinDoc
a project by Danila Blasi, Manuela Cirfera, Enrica Felici, Giordano Novielli, Francesca Schipani | curatorship Enrica Felici and Francesca Schipani | artistic consultancy Danila Blasi | community dance workshop participants Nadia Centra, Daniela Di Dato, Ilaria Franciotti, Francesca Romana Gambetti, Sabrina Milani, Maria Genovese, Stefania Savelli, Loredana Schiaulini, Marisa Spatolisano, Giulia Tramentozzi, Giorgia Trentin | a co-production PinDoc – Rosa Shocking/Festival Tendance
“To these fragile red stains, to these tears of life that nobody provokes and that nonetheless arrive unpredictably, in the middle of the fields, in the middle of the days, of our days.”
C. BOBIN
“Why is the symbol a flower and not a rifle?” “Because we believed in something better.”
MAURO BIANI
We are a group of women. We move in single file, repeating the same movements, without knowing one another, without recognising one another. Workers in the production line that thins desire, we carry in our pockets seeds that keep falling on infertile ground. But we are a group of women and we believe those seeds will split the asphalt, sooner or later. Our bodies traverse space, beyond the duty to do, beyond the duty to be. We are a group of women that unveils itself little by little, that breaks the asphalt of indifference, that pauses in the gaze, that cries out in the aphasia of modernity. We are a group of women — those red flowers that are dishevelled by the wind of existence; we are the story of those who have had no voice, of abused women, trapped women, women killed in every form that death can take; of children dying under bombs, of children left alone among the bombs, of all those to whom blossoming is denied in life.
We are different, fragile, magnificent before our own eyes, before your eyes, before the humanity that often closes its eyes. But we partake of humanity, we defend ourselves and a proportionate world. We want to be free, to use our bodies with all their uncomfortable beauty so that one may learn to look at us and respect us. And even if looking and respecting were empty shells of words, we would continue to believe that it is in becoming community that utopia becomes fact, that differences mutate into particularities, opportunities and reasons.
We believe it is possible to overcome insecurity, rejection; that one can learn to find oneself and to part, enriched by the encounter, in the respect of choices and desires. Human beings are seeds that the wind of society must cause to flower, guaranteeing them “bread and roses” and training them for the currents of life. We are a group of women who are not indifferent, first and foremost, to themselves — and for this reason we recognise the other. By dancing together we overcome fear and judgement, we savour beauty, we nurture the hope that a possible world, a just place, will sooner or later come to be. That that flower, in the asphalt, will bloom. We are a group of women. We are.
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.