Suspended between society and art, community dance has now spread to Italy with experiences that penetrate everyday life and involve unsuspecting groups. Among the first authors to experiment with a 'dance for all' is undoubtedly Virgilio Sieni, the creator of movement and gesture projects capable of transforming into extraordinary moments of sharing and social integration. The Florentine choreographer has engaged in the last decade with children, the elderly, the visually impaired, partisans, and relatives of victims of terrorism, favoring relationships with the territory, history, and the iconography that characterize it.
This will also be the case for Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, a special training project of Biennale College Danza launched by Sieni in December 2013, with its world premiere taking place in July as part of the 9th International Contemporary Dance Festival of the Biennale di Venezia. Involving six Italian regions and over 150 non-professional performers, the project focuses on the realization of twenty-seven scenes inspired by the Gospel of the apostle Matthew. Two of these scenes, Annuncio dell’Angelo and Ultima Cena, come from groups in Trentino who chose to engage themselves. Assisting Sieni in this grand project in stages is the experience of Franca Zagatti, who had a successful experience in Rovereto last year, where she made thirty people aged between 8 and 86 dance in the moving performance Danze di vita quotidiana.
In Annuncio dell’Angelo and Ultima Cena, two different types of announcement come into play. “In the first,” Sieni explains, “a man and a woman, caught in unison in a moment of tactile knowledge of the body, remember Joseph's dream in which the Virgin's husband received the announcement of Christ's coming. In the second, where the influence of the pictorial iconography of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci is strong, a sense of disorientation and threat is introduced in the face of the certainty of death, which translates into a fresco of restrained encounters, suspensions, and losses of balance, in a continuous and unfulfilled search for the other.”
