During the winter months, when the moon is full or nearly full, its light can sometimes be refracted by ice crystals in the high clouds, creating a circular halo around the satellite with two symmetrical gleams at its sides: the moon dogs. Atmospheric phenomena that folk tradition once read as omens of storms, but also as signals of transition—visual thresholds into the invisible.

CANI LUNARI is a choreographic project that crosses these thresholds and immerses itself in an imaginary rooted in the archaic feminine, in magical knowledge, in ecstatic bodies. A sensitive inquiry into the figure of the witch, the healer: not as folkloric residue or demonized stereotype, but as the emblem of marginal yet powerful knowledge, resisting the logic of utility and visibility.

Through a process of research combining archival materials, oral testimonies, folkloric iconographies, and bodily practices, CANI LUNARI builds a performative rite in which the body dances trance, ecstasy, metamorphosis. The performers, holding taxidermy crows—souls released, spirit animals, threshold guides—enact gestures suspended between ritual and fiction, magic and theatrical play. Movement feeds on fragmentations, limps, archaic gestures, and sudden slips into animality, evoking a world where the boundary between human and beyond-human is porous and mutable. The body moves “above water and above wind,” echoing ancient formulas that still resonate in some Italian territories at the margins.

At the heart of the project lies a reflection on the hysterical body, a feminine site of crisis and enigma, historically linked to the figure of the witch and to states of possession. The 19th-century photographs of the Salpêtrière become symbolic material to embody: bodies out of control, traversed by the invisible, performing a different kind of knowledge. The witch’s body becomes a threshold-organism between dimensions—as John Cotta once wrote, “not a traveler between worlds, but the site of encounter between different spheres of being.”

CANI LUNARI recalls a knowledge that is both political and sensorial, an embodied epistemology. The soul—bird or breath—leaves the mouth, flies, detaches, and then returns to the body. As in the confessions extorted from persecuted women—often visionaries, storytellers, healers—the body becomes narrative, ritual of healing, exercise in survival. The soundscape, created by Vera Di Lecce, interweaves electronics and natural sound, oral chants and magical formulas, in a score suspended between the earthly and the divine.

CANI LUNARI is a crossing, a white sabbath, a collective ritual to re-enchant the world.