Margherita Landi
& Agnese Lanza

The project actively involves residents and the unique landscapes of small towns, creating site-specific, community-based artworks that resonate with the emotional significance of each place, establishing an archive of different hugs and a network of towns.

The audience participates in a 360° Virtual Reality experience, where residents of small towns are filmed performing simple gestures like hugging in meaningful local locations. Wearing VR headsets, users are invited to mirror these gestures, transforming their movements into a personal, intimate experience. Spectators without headsets witness the participants’ synchronized movements, creating a live performance that blurs the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds. The project emphasizes the importance of preserving local culture and fostering empathy in an age of digital interaction. By highlighting the unique ways different communities express connection, Embracing Places aims to address issues of isolation and bring awareness to the cultural richness of underrepresented towns, creating a living archive of shared, universal gestures.

It is often thought that absence is immaterial, forgetting that to perceive it, access to one’s physical and emotional memories is required. In reality, we cannot miss what we do not know or do not remember.

The project aims to work on the real-time learning of a brief movement score through the VR headset and then practice staying in the gaps of memory of what has been learned. The choreographic content consists of scenes that evoke something we all know well: the playfulness of children and their free and imaginative movement when, at around 4-5 years old, they have not yet been contaminated by prejudices or expectations.

For a dancer, the challenging aspect of accepting the void of memory is the judgment that this moment carries with it. In this profession, one is often required to remember every movement in a sequence. The intention is, in fact, to bring the dancer back to those physical memories preceding the construction of these expectations, to rediscover the beauty of simply being in any dimension, even in the void.

The Virtual Reality (VR) headset here becomes a present/absent object, the primary experiential tool, a mask through which one learns in real-time, teleporting the performer to a place of childhood, filled with play and free movement, from which they can spontaneously borrow gestures and sequences, constructing a unique movement score for each person, all starting from the same video material.

The process consists of an ‘inside,’ invisible to the spectator but perceptible on the dancer’s body, and an ‘outside,’ which is the generated performative aftermath

The project explores the physical dynamics of the relationship between those who are elsewhere, in VR, and those who are here. The VR headset becomes a tool to transport the body into a state of immersion in another reality and absence in our own, leaving us, the observers, with the question: what kind of relationship can we establish with this body and the experience it is undergoing? What is it feeling? Does it need a connection to the here and now, or perhaps the freedom to fully journey into the elsewhere?”

Through Instagram calls, we implemented a kind of choreographic delivery. The selected dancers received Virtual Reality (VR) headsets by mail containing choreographic materials.

This led to a reflection on Virtual Reality on two levels: the dimension inside the headset, where an intimate experience takes place with the viewing of a 360-degree content visible only to the dancer. And outside the headset, which demonstrates how the VR experience influences the body of the viewer/dancer and becomes a resource that generates movement.

The project’s Instagram profile (@dealing_with_absence) is passed from one dancer to another, and through visual storytelling, they have turned it into a diary that narrates their journey.

Peaceful Place” is an experimental project that combines physical and emotional experiences through Virtual Reality.

Upon wearing the headset, the viewer encounters four real-life affectionate couples (grandparent and grandchild, mother and son, mother and adult daughter, childhood friends) and mimics their gestures. The user has the opportunity to embody the hugs and affectionate gestures seen in the video, thus starting to move and compose a simple instant choreography made up of affectionate gestures. Virtual reality becomes a tool to “enhance” the bodily experience and, at the same time, a means of conveying a language.

The project is the winner of the 2021 Auggie Award in the Best Art category.

Through the selection of scenes from films by director Jim Jarmusch, we extracted movements that, when removed from the film’s narrative context, could transform into dance based purely on physicality.

Two swivel chairs enable the content to be experienced in motion, accessible to everyone, and the choreography is designed to be easily interpreted. The work takes the form of a participatory installation.

Tu-torial #1 aims to delve into the process of learning a physical language from the screen, an action we unconsciously perform every day, and the possibility of creating a choreographic score from a video montage.

“From Screen to Body” is an extension of Tutorial #1.

The creation of a choreographic score starting from a video montage has evolved into a performance: Two dancers initiate the choreographic act and then hand over the headset to two audience volunteers, thus forming a quartet.

The two volunteers are brought in to dance together and touch each other; they can see the choreography but not each other.