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

In #TITLETOBEDEFINED, a team of five dancers, led by a choreographer, and a video crew directed by a filmmaker attempt to engage with this historical moment and the questions it raises, gathering thoughts and impressions in order to turn them into body and reflection. Between the fullness and emptiness of five short danced narratives, a space for dialogue is intended to emerge: a free zone able to hold our aspirations and secrets, memories and desires.

The project begins with an online campaign: a series of open questions addressed to users through regular social-media posts on Instagram and Facebook. The responses—shared privately or publicly in the comments, in whichever form best reflects each participant’s sensibility (short texts, words, images, videos, drawings, musical excerpts, and so on)—become an open diary from which the five dancers draw as they create their five danced micro-narratives.

Every body is a diary; on every page lie countless memories, each shaping who we are, the paths and qualities of our movement. We can learn to read through these “ways”, learn to dance them, and let them tell the rich vocabulary of our history. We may be surprised to rediscover, hidden in the fold of an elbow, a smile from childhood; silent between the shoulder blades, embraces suspended in the most precious moments of farewell; or wrapped around our fingers, the landscapes and faces we once pointed to and photographed in our memory, so as never to forget their colour.

The body is therefore a poetic space from which aspirations, impulses, memories and projections of the imagination sprout. Every body questions the world and its own relationship with it, in relation to its collective soul: a synthesis of memory, experience and desire. Through this questioning, every body develops its own vocabulary; it acts and reacts to the world, embodying its meanings and contradictions.

Within the complex creative process that leads to dance, this questioning is the essential tool at the basis of choreographic construction and of its adherence to a given meaning. Every movement that makes up the choreography emerges from an inquiry into the self and from a relationship with the outside world—spaces, things and people.

Dance is ignited by the convergence of experience and perception, by the shift in perspective that arises through our relationship with the other. It becomes a physical narrative capable, at last, of speaking to us profoundly because, having returned from this journey, it embodies and sublimates not the experience of the EGO, but of the I: something, someone, that moves within the individual while speaking on behalf of everyone, passing through, unsettling, opening questions and exposing vulnerability.