On the occasion of International Dance Day, April 29, 2025, the Centro Coreografico Nazionale / Aterballetto presents two events which, though geographically distant, are connected by a conceptual and sensorial thread: the body as a site of tension, sensuality, and eros, sublimated through the act of dance.

In the British capital, CCN/Aterballetto—together with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in London—presents a work that perfectly embodies the sensual ambiguity of contemporary dance. Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda is drawn from the famous episode in Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (Canto XII), and unfolds as an intense, physical, and dramatic choreographic score, elevated by Claudio Monteverdi’s baroque music.

Tasso depicts a nocturnal duel between two unsuspecting lovers, in a tragic and carnal crescendo where violence becomes a vehicle for intimacy. Critics and scholars have long highlighted the erotic charge of Tasso’s text—a metaphor for the inner conflict between passion and reason, where the body becomes the battleground for opposing and complementary forces. Clorinda’s concealed identity, hidden beneath armor, heightens the tension between eros and thanatos, while the final death scene takes on the tones of a mystical consummation.

The choreography translates all this into movement: dance becomes a space of contact and enigma, a sensitive surface where identity dissolves into the energy of motion.

The second edition of Visioni del Corpo: vedere l’arte contemporanea attraverso la danza d’autore (Visioni del Corpo: seeing contemporary art through signature dance) — a multidisciplinary project curated by Nicolas Ballario.

The first event, titled Arte e Sesso (Art and Sex), explores representations of desire in contemporary artistic creation, setting the dancing body in dialogue with philosophical, aesthetic, and political reflections.

Here, the body becomes both a site of exposure and a space of resistance—capable of suggesting, evoking, and provoking. Through video projections, readings, and performative interventions curated by choreographer Francesco Marilungo, the event approaches eros not as an object, but as energy, language, and embodied thought.

Distant in space but united in spirit, the two events celebrate dance’s power to restore the body to its original function: a living symbol, a vessel of meaning, a terrain of ambiguity. The sensuality evoked is never self-indulgent, but always mediated, transfigured, elevated—sublimated, to borrow a Freudian term—through artistic form.

CCN/Aterballetto chooses to honor International Dance Day with a dual gesture: one staged, where eros is consumed in the choreographic tragedy of Tancredi e Clorinda; the other discursive and performative, where desire is analyzed, observed, interpreted.

Both events remind us that dance is, above all, a language of the body—and the body, always, is the place where art meets eros.