Dancing by yourself

We no longer dance together. Dancing with a partner has long since become obsolete or has been replaced by conventions such as tango or salsa classes. However, when we go out to dance, people dance alone. The urge to appease the noise that surrounds us is so great that what we seek is to abstract ourselves, to overflow the contours of the individual body through collective catharsis, but dancing alone, you with your body and me with mine. Where is the coming together through dance? How to dance with someone else, to listen to someone else, to affect someone else, in short, to dance together, in plural? Through dancing in pairs, how can we interact with the other, without understanding the body as an object to be disciplined, to be measured, to be sexualised, but rather as a singular subject with a tone, a force, internal tensions and cadences, and a perception of the world that is different from my own? In these differences, how can we dance, by listening to each other in a negotiation of forces, which is not a confrontation but a collaboration? How do we dance, turn, jump, move through space, understanding that this gap between you and me does not separate two bodies, but rather, given that we are unfinished subjects, it braids us, runs through us and affects us? Understanding that no one has the power to decide over the other, but rather that the dance takes place precisely in this listening and in this space, where we are and stand together.

Through dancing in pairs, and occasionally in groups, the objectives of this practice are to produce fertile ground for a meeting that has to do with listening and knowledge between two bodies, with emotions and feelings, and with the perception of my body, of the partner's body and of the space. There is also the desire to mobilise forms and stereotypes which, especially in adolescence, prevent us from imagining and relating to each other in other ways, and which affect us directly in the body, even articulating us physiognomically.