In May, An Ideal City, an international project that explores different ways of enjoying dance, at the crossroads of different venues and languages, starts up again.

Conceived and coordinated by the Fondazione Nazionale della Danza / Aterballetto – Reggio Emilia – in partnership with Les Halles de Schaerbeek – Brussels – and the Ballet of the Greek National Opera – Athens, An Ideal City designs a route in stages in which, for 22 months, 21 performances signed by some of the most significant contemporary choreographers will take place in institutional venues and public spaces of the three cities involved.

The project, co-financed by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union, has a twofold objective: the search for a direct and immediate relationship between dance and its audience (outside the designated venues); the proposal of a dynamic and fluid experience of the city by the inhabitants, thanks to the encounter with art.

The artistic centre of the project are the MicroDances, which were presented in autumn 2021 in Athens, Reggio Emilia and Brussels.

From January to May, some of the MicroDances were at the centre of a reenactment process: a transposition of the original versions for young dancers and public spaces aimed at the creation of an urban version that can interpret the spirit and characteristics of the three cities involved.

In March, the students of Agora Coaching Project and Studio XL (Reggio Emilia), the students of the professional dance school of the Greek National Opera (Athens) and the performers chosen by Les Halles de Schaerbeek (Brussels) met in our Foundry and spent ten intense days of work, in which they learnt 8 of the MicroDances previously performed by the Aterballetto company and the Greek Opera Ballet.

The MicroDances covered by the reenactment are the following:

1. Active Motivation – Elena Kekkou
2. Eppur si Muove – Francesca Lattuada
3. Fantasmagoria – Markella Manoliadi
4. Forget Me Not – Konstantinos Rigos
5. Knight Rider – Yannis Nicolaidis
6. Pensieri di carta – Hélias Tur Dorvault
7. Strôma – Giovanni Insaudo
8. Turn the Tide – Roberto Tedesco

The result is a project that creatively wanders among very different contexts – historical centers, industrial areas, residual spaces, symbolic places of the cities – defining unusual stages and creating radically new opportunities to meet the public. The leitmotif of the three experiments is research into dance as a form of living, in relation to contemporary artistic practices that are rooted in the territory.

The micro/macro relationship established by the confrontation with the urban space is the same that articulates the conceptual space of the choreography and the lived space, as well as the dialectic I/other, activated by the transmission of the choreographies to the dancers in training who become mediators of an unprecedented experience.

The binary gaze that links spectator↔artwork becomes a performer-spectator-urban landscape triangulation. To the memory of the body in the reenactment is added the unlived memory of another author and another performance, the real memory of the dancer interferes with the one never experienced but included in the new version in act.