Fondazione Nazionale della Danza in partnership with the educational workshop Officina Educativa organizes and runs expressive-body movement workshops in order to carry out training, performance, study and research activities geared towards promoting social inclusion and supporting young people’s artistic-expressive potential.
Arturo Cannistrà, alongside the educators from Officina Educativa, works with a group of students from lower secondary schools on a project involving the production of a performance.
Officina Educativa is a service provided by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia that works to support local state schools and education agencies sharing issues and goals with them, with the aim of offering children and young people contexts that give them the opportunity to discover their potentials, abilities, ideas and ways of understanding and learning through the relationship with others. It has an open and broad idea of education that embraces the whole child or young person while trying to promote diverse routes to knowledge through different expressive/communicative languages.

LA BELLEZZA (THE BEAUTY), a research project involving Officina Educativa and the Polo delle Arti ( Fondazione Nazionale della Danza, Istituto Musicale Peri-Merulo, Fondazione I Teatri), a project between performing arts expressive languages and school.
An experience involving three classes from three secondary schools in the town of Reggio Emilia: I.C. Fontanesi, I.C. Fermi, I.C. Galilei-Massenzatico.

Specchiarsi nel Divenire (Looking into the Mirror of Becoming)

“This is the fourth year of collaboration with Fondazione Nazionale della Danza.
The project was held with the same group of young participants for three consecutive years. At the end of last year, half the group went on to upper secondary school and there are now 10 students left from the 3rd year of the E. Fermi lower secondary school.

The issue of continuity is interesting because every year we shared a different goal with the youths in terms of the choreography. In the first and second years, a group of workshop participants themselves danced to the choreography. In the third year, the dance was performed by a group of students from the city’s dance schools based on the suggestions and ideas of the workshop participants who worked on communication.

This year, the idea is to have a mixed group with workshop participants and a group of students from different dance schools in the city.
We gave the students a theme, DIVENIRE (BECOMING), and a title, the title of the workshop, SPECCHIARSI NEL DIVENIRE (LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR OF BECOMING).
By working in small groups and exchanging ideas, the young students explored the theme of becoming, looking at the various meanings of the word as well as creating a dialogue between the different expressive languages of photography, video, gesture and movement, and narrative, in order to convey and perform the concept/concepts and their ideas about becoming.”

Paola Ferretti – Officina Educativa

The students form the dance schools of Reggio Emilia and the workshop students from the Istituto Comprensivo ‘Enrico Fermi’ worked with Arturo Cannistrà from January to May in the spaces of the Fonderia.

The performance was staged at the Teatro Cavallerizza theatre in Reggio Emilia on Tuesday, 29 May 2018.