Slow Dancing Parties

Le Alleanze dei Corpi returns to Milan from September 19 to 28, with a program of dance, performance, sound, listening, encounters, and participatory practices. The seventh edition continues the investigation into the relationship between body and territory, structured over the years according to three distinct conceptual axes—threshold (2025), home (2026), field (2027)—which invite us to traverse public space and the complexity of the urban landscape with an eye to the frictions, cavities, hiding places, and fractures of living, but also to the possible devices of disruption and change.

Le Alleanze dei Corpi is a plural creature, a Hydra, a body with multiple heads or a head with multiple bodies, a Chimera that feeds on the reflections and gatherings that have taken place in recent months, in this time to which we are consigned. This is a time of collapse, a transition of darkness, murkiness and oiliness; a nigredo without the impetus of alchemical transformation. 

Surrounded by horror, dread and tragedy, we are confronted with the genocide of the Palestinian population in Gaza. This issue cannot be ignored in any thought, space or moment that we experience. We are confronted with revealing evidence of sovereign power and the resurgence of neo-fascism, which was more hidden in the past, but never ended. We asked ourselves how to proceed, and how to rethink a context of imagination, collective presence and celebration. We asked ourselves whether such experiences were still possible, and if so, which languages would need to be consulted to find words that were still unknown.

The programme is composite, emerging from the words and visions of others, stolen and then sewn-together, mended and intertwined: a dawn, a snake, a slow dance, fires in the sky, the cinema eros,  fires in Viale Monza—real attacks on love and pleasure, then reclaimed—as well as the monstrous, the necropolitics, the indomitable deaths with which the future is being swallowed. 

Slow Dancing Parties Dark Fantastic Dreams is the subtitle that borrows words from an interview with David Lynch about the role of education in adolescence. In the interview, the director talks about the value of what is off-course and lateral—everything that overflows and escapes the institution—as a real tool for learning and transformation. Among Lynch’s recollections of the elements that spark that time of indistinctness, slow dances and terribly dark and fantastic dreams emerge and resonate. It is an invitation to face the uncanny, navigate metaphorical and real nightmares, and explore alternative methodologies and new temporalities. 

Performance and dance offer us a strategy and a possible way to navigate these. As an embodied poetic language, they can reveal themselves  within bodies, with wild impetuosity or bloodless grace. They invite us to sharpen our perception and senses and experience the physicality of matter. They enable us to become bodies.

This composite constellation comprises several voices that make up the programme. One of these is Jacopo Miliani, involved in a Carte Blanche project entitled Scent of Indecent Scenes, dedicated to the memory of the 1983 Cinema Eros massacre. This neo-Nazi attack, carried out by the Ludwig collective, resulted in six deaths and took place in the neighbourhood at the heart of the territorial activity of Le Alleanze dei Corpi. According to Miliani, the project “does not connect to the tragic fire through documentary research, but rather through a journey through visual arts, cinema and performance. It is an act of claiming the political and social importance of pleasure as a possible response to, and alternative for, a tragic story.”

Another voice is that of the curatorial team that composed Aurore: a programme of talks and meetings conceived in various forms with Lavinia Hanay Raja, and together with Ilenia Caleo and Maddalena Fragnito.  From the practices for overcoming horror to the desire to set the sky on fire. 

Born from a dialogue with Daniela Cascella around the striking text Dell’Aurora by Maria Zambrano—a poet, philosopher, and writer who was in perpetual exile from Franco’s Spain—the concept of aurora, aurora, of a light still steeped in the night, and of the illegitimate and incendiary process of coming into the world and emerging, becomes the guiding principle of the project’s conversations, curated by the different curators. Adopting various perspectives on the themes of latency, rising and emergence, the  dialogical interventions invite us to contemplate transformation from a perceptual angle, gradually evoking milky, opaque experiences and incendiary practices.

 “So that darkness does not devour our bones and impede our ability to think and desire, to open up spaces for imagination and action, let us return to the beginning. How does one begin something that did not exist before, especially in the darkest of times? Auroral moments: principles, initiations. But also states of transition and passage, not fixed. Moments of burning, shining and glowing. After all, the aurora is a flame, as are the experiences we look at: struggles, (the invention of) a new commonality, insurrection and rupture,” write Ilenia Caleo and Maddalena Fragnito in the introductory text.

”Aurore. To Maria Zambrano’s Voice,” is also the title of Daniela Cascella’s poetic intervention, which opens the programme of performative poetry. This will be developed in various forms by Giulia Crispiani, who will present the urban walk allegoria antifascista n°2 (anti-fascist allegory no. 2), and by Jonida Prifti’s Sorelle di confine (Sisters of the Border), who she will present  accompanied by the music of Hugo Sanchez. 

Then there’s the voice of  Edoardo Lazzari, co-curator of the general programme for Slow Dancing Parties Dark Fantastic Dreams. In his own words: ”Le Alleanze dei Corpi is a festival conceived as a temporary assembly and collective device, rather than a container of works. Each encounter and performance becomes part of a shared fabric created over time as people gather, share their breathe, pause, and experience the friction between bodies and languages. It is in this assembly-like dimension that a form of embodied pedagogy is generated, based not on the vertical transmission of content, but on mutual learning and the invention of new ways of being together.”

He adds, ”The gatherings are not intended as ancillary moments, but as the very substance of the programme: situations of co-presence in which performative and political gestures touch each other, opening up a space to imagine possible communities. In the slow movement of a dance, in the words uttered in unison, and in the simple act of coming together, the potential to transform the urban space that hosts us, and to give substance to ephemeral yet vital forms of alliance, is realised.”

At the heart of Le Alleanze dei Corpi are pedagogical approaches, embodied assemblies, participatory processes, and the reclamation of public spaces by bodies. These elements act as shifts and devices for slipping between practices and theories, forming a conceptual and material magma from which the programme’s articulation emerges. The practices led by Sara Sguotti, Arianna Ulian, Diana Anselmo, Giuseppe Cumuniello, Francesca Proia, and Andreana Notaro traverse the embodiment of language, adopting a perspective that questions the normative and ableist aspects of dance and corporeality. They propose subtle and milky voices, mantras and invisible rituals that exist between audibility and inaudibility.

The location of this laboratory of imagination is also significant: the Via Padova area, where the festival is held, and the Fabbrica del Vapore area. The latter is a place of excess, overflowing with bodies, colours, smells and voices of communities; the public cultural space is regimented by gates and podiums and experiences the paradox of being isolated from the vital and problematic neighbourhood of Chinatown. It is no coincidence that the programme begins with Scent of Indecent Scenes inside a disused pastry factory. Among the ancient dough rooms and underground boilers, the factory survives as a remnant of a constantly transforming territory and city. The question of traversability and the relationship between public and private spaces opens up a desire for dispossession and reappropriation through fleeting, fugitive forms.