The body is the only means I have to reach the heart of things.
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

In #TITLETOBEDEFINED, a team of five dancers—coordinated by a choreographer—and a video crew led by a film director set out to engage with the present moment and the questions it raises, gathering thoughts and impressions in order to embody them as reflection. Between fullness and emptiness, five short danced narratives create a space for dialogue—a neutral zone capable of holding our aspirations and secrets, memories and desires.

The project begins with an online campaign: a series of open questions addressed to users through periodic social media posts (Instagram, Facebook). Responses—shared privately or publicly, in the form that best expresses each participant’s sensibility (short texts, words, images, videos, drawings, musical excerpts, etc.)—become an open diary from which the five dancers draw material to construct their five micro-danced narratives.

Each body is a diary; on every page, an infinity of memories, each of which shapes who we are, the paths we take, and the quality of our movement. We can learn to read through these “modes,” to dance them, and to let them speak the rich vocabulary of our personal histories. We might be surprised to rediscover, hidden in the fold of an elbow, a smile from childhood; held silently between the shoulder blades, embraces suspended in the most precious farewells; or wrapped around our fingers, the landscapes and faces we once pointed to and photographed in our memory so as never to forget their colors.

The body thus becomes a poetic space from which aspirations, impulses, memories, and projections of the imagination emerge. Each body questions the world and its own relationship with it, in relation to a collective soul that is the sum of memory, experience, and desire. From this questioning, every body develops its own vocabulary, acting and reacting to the world by embodying its meanings and contradictions.

Within the articulated creative process that leads to dance, this questioning is the essential tool underlying choreographic construction and its adherence to meaning. Every movement that forms the choreography arises from an interrogation of the self and from the relationship with the outside—spaces, objects, people. From the convergence of experience and perception, from the shift in perspective that emerges through encountering the other, dance is ignited.

It becomes a physical narrative capable of speaking to us deeply because, having traversed this journey, it embodies and sublimates not the experience of the ego, but of the self: something—someone—that moves within the individual while speaking on behalf of all, crossing boundaries, cracking certainties, opening questions, and exposing fragility.