ZTA-temporarily autonomous zone is a dancing procession, a parade of bodies of different ages that symbolically links two places in the city of Reggio Emilia: the tricolor ballroom dance hall and the skate park, skirting the redeveloped spaces of the Reggio Emilia area, occupying streets, roundabouts and urban elements in an uninterrupted flow of people dancing and ‘pedalling’ to bring bodies and music towards a shared ‘beyond’.
The performance is the final result of the Workshop entitled Dal liscio al rave (From ballroom dancing to rave), an intergenerational dance project that involved citizens of Reggio Emilia over 55 and under 25, realised by the National Dance Foundation/Aterballetto (within Over Dance) together with Fondazione I Teatri, the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, Laboratorio Aperto dei Chiostri di San Pietro, with the support of Fondazione Manodori and the collaboration of the social centres Rosta Nuova, La Mirandola and Tricolore, where the workshop took place between November 2022 and May 2023. The choreography is by Lara Guidetti.
The musical and relational structures and steps of ballroom dancing are confronted with the anarchy of the rave that calls for a freer and more connected collectivity, rejecting roles and conventions. The procession will see the citizens of the “from ballroom dancing to rave” workshop parade, who for months have been engaged in a reciprocal exchange of physical practices and knowledge, immersing themselves in the steps of the different dances, inventing new ones and opening up to a primitive movement without rules, to become, literally, a single “dance body”. Accompanying them, along with the music, will be words and testimonies by the historical protagonists of the two universes: from Casadei and Castellina, to the workers of the Reggio Emilia dances and the rave groups of the 1990s and 2000s.
A journey “From ballroom dancing to rave” as a possible equation between tradition and innovation: constantly moving processes that reflect different epochs but are inevitably intertwined in the present and in the intergenerational relationship that is sublimated in the discovery that the internal motor of dance is always the same. Here, then, we have the opportunity to suspend time for a moment and transform the streets of the city into a social centre and extended stage where different ages integrate as if in a single organism.
