SAKURA
Community Dance
Open urban choreographic action for everyone.
A distance workshop, but in person.
A collective choreographic action, on video, but live — open to all those interested in taking part and experimenting in this only-postponed spring.
a project by Danila Blasi, Enrica Felici, Giordano Novielli, Francesca Schipani | a co-production TenDance contemporary dance festival / ROSA Shocking Ass.cult. – PinDoc/production and promotion contemporary dance | in collaboration with State Conservatory of Music “Ottorino Respighi” | with the support of MiC, Regione Siciliana
AT EVERY GATE — SPRING BEGINS — FROM THE MUD ON THE SANDALS.
In September 2019, Theodor Rawyler passed away. Theo. One of the three directors of Tendance, the contemporary dance festival that Rosa Shocking has been envisioning and realising in Latina for years.
In October 2019, the eighth edition of Tendance was due to begin. But there was more: by 30 September we had to submit the project for the 2020 edition to the Regione Lazio.
And all of us — all of us who dedicate ourselves to the festival each year with love and passion — could not imagine how.
How to organise the 2019 edition. How to envision the 2020 one. Without Theo. He had left, and had left us mutilated, lost, hollow.
We were helped, of course. Our fellow travellers from Latina, who supported and encouraged us. And our companions in life — our small/great family — who came from every corner of Italy to lend a hand.
And then there was Theo.Who had not, in fact, truly left us mutilated, lost and hollow. Not at all. On the contrary: he had left us a great deal of material that had entered our heads and our bodies and that we had to put back out there, back into play, into our imagining and our building.
And so, while Giordano and I were sitting in the office writing the project for the Regione and talking about how to realise that community dance event — which was to involve the citizens, the students, the elderly of Latina, in a collective urban dance performance — while we were trying to imagine its contours, Giordano uttered the word “Sakura”. And it was immediately clear that this, and nothing else, would have to be the heart of our next festival.
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.
