Photo gallery: Dance without Limits with Adam Benjamin – nowhere to hide
Dance without Limits was the title of a weekend in Gallarate, near Milan, with a conference, demonstration and three workshops on inclusivity in dance.
Adam Benjamin (founder of CandoCo) held the workshops and spoke of his experiences, with great sensitivity, but also humour – a mischievous twinkle in his eye, never far away. A brilliant trick with him grabbing for his water bottle as it seemed to leap out of his hand and fly through the air illustrated his discussion during the conference about accidents leading to discovery. This theme continued in his workshops which showed how to explore, discover, sense, and feel our bodies, the space they occupy, and the bodies of others, in an environment where mistakes are seen as positives. Nondisabled participants, some from contemporary dance and classical ballet, had the safety net of choreography and music removed, putting younger and older, disabled and non, on a level playing field.
Monica Morselli, who works in similar fields to Benjamin, and uses dance as therapy, spoke about her experiences, illustrated by an extraordinarily touching film showing a white-haired woman with multiple sclerosis moving her arms in an improvised but compellingly poetic way. Morselli also translated for Benjamin.
Nicoletta Ferri – a university teacher on body-based pedagogy – spoke, as did Franca Zagatti: “We need to be able to speak to the other half of the world, that half made up of people without dance, who don’t see it, don’t do it, don’t study it, don’t know it.” Part of Zagatti’s work is in community dance and to perform she brought four “over-65s”, and one was well over. She was Eugenia Casini-Ropa, an Italian art historian and writer from Bologna University, who taught about the history theatre, dance and mime. After the piece was over, she spoke eloquently on the ‘right’ to dance… even at 85.
Cinzia Puricelli, the organiser of the event, interviewed Simona Atzori. Atzori is an Italian artist and dancer from Milan, who was born without arms, and uses her feet to draw, write and perform. She has great charm and spoke about young Vitoria Bueno from Brazil, also born without arms, and who was inspired to follow her dream to dance after seeing videos of Atzori, now 50.
Puricelli chose keywords from each speaker’s contribution – experience, resource, connection, transformation – though she didn’t say ‘pioneer’… pioneers like Atzori, and Benjamin who started putting disabled dancers front and centre at the beginning of the 1990s.
In the forward to the second edition of Benjamin’s book, Making an Entrance: Dancing Out the Message Behind Inclusive Practice, he writes:
The process of teaching dance proposed in this book is not about providing ‘moves’ behind which we can hide, it is in fact quite the opposite. It is about learning to be present in our body without artifice, learning how we use our weight, how we balance movement and stillness, how we notice breath and read tension. It is about how we negotiate decisions in time and space, how we empathize with others, while having the courage to develop our own ideas. It is about creativity and criticism, in short, it is about how we make best use of our physical and mental resources. This is dance as education, about the body and mind through the use of body and mind, an approach that I believe can both complement current practice and offer something of value to the huge number of students failed by an emphasis on competition as the sole means of educating (or controlling) the body; those children afraid to participate in formal dance classes or sports for fear of being judged, and those increasing numbers of children afraid to engage in communal activity because they have missed out on the experience of play, children at odds with their body, and reinforced as physical failures at every so-called ‘physical education’ class.
Below is a gallery of photos of Dance without Limits/Danza senza limiti event.
Graham Spicer, aka ‘Gramilano’, is a writer, director and photographer based in Milan. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy. His articles have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the Danza in Italia column for Dancing Times magazine. Graham was the historical advisor on Codice Carla, the 2023 documentary on Italian ballerina Carla Fracci.
Graham also works as a dance photographer, and his photos have appeared in many books, theatre programmes, and magazines, including Dancing Times, Dance Spirit and Ballet2000, as well as all the major Italian newspapers.
He is a member of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle.
