The Dynamics of an Expanding Friendship. Community Making in the Streets of Porto Marghera
10.6092/issn.2036-1599/8758
Mar Gh’era. Un Secolo In Corsa (2017/18) è un progetto coreografico che è riuscito a trasformare temporaneamente un luogo industriale trascurato in una occasione di riscoperta della comunità. Creato dalla coreografa veneziana Laura Boato, ha coinvolto più di cento performers e un ancora più ampio pubblico. Il saggio esplora ciò che si può apprendere da questa performance urbana, che ha avuto origine nell'area del Veneto, per estendere la comprensione della danza di (e attraverso la) comunità. Come e perché si forma una comunità? Contestualizzando il concetto di "comune", inteso come ciò che lega insieme una comunità di persone diverse (Day, 2006), nell’esperienza coreografica, i concetti fondamentali di questa ricerca sono la cittadinanza culturale (Stevenson 2003), l’evoluzione del senso del luogo (Appadurai, 1996) e la condivisione del "now-ness".
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The Dynamics of an Expanding Friendship. Community Making in the Streets of Porto Marghera
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Ariadne Mikou
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The Dynamics of an Expanding Friendship. Community Making in the Streets of Porto Marghera
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                                                   Ariadne Mikou


          The Dynamics of an Expanding Friendship.
       Community Making in the Streets of Porto Marghera




Introduction
      Earlier this year, during a recently established dance festival 1 in Sicily, the Italian dance scholar
and historian Alessandro Pontremoli made an attempt to classify the current scene of dance as a theatre
form into three aesthetic landscapes:

   — the “museal”; the one that refers to the notion of museum as a place of collection and memory
        and it may include the reconstructions of historic dance works
   — a second landscape that embraces recognizable dance material derived from the traditions of
        Western theatre dance and
   — a third landscape that comprises less recognizable choreographic practices that challenge the
        conventional definition of dance. 2

      In the last one, as Pontremoli claims, there is a direct association to Gilles Clement’s The Third
Landscape, which refers to

            the sum of space left over by man to landscape evolution – to nature alone. Included in this
        category are left behind (délaissé) urban or rural sites, transitional spaces, neglected land (friches),
        swamps, moors, peat bogs, but also roadsides, shores, railroad embankments […]. 3

      The unattended nature that grows in the marginalized and neglected areas around human con-
structions is characterized by diversity and unconstrained evolution, and in Pontremoli’s classifica-

     1. The festival is called ConFormazioni. Festival di Danza e Linguaggi Contemporanei and it was first established in 2017.
     2. Cfr. Alessandro Pontremoli, Memoria e Trasmissione, in ConFormazioni. Festival di Danza e Linguaggi Contemporanei,
Palermo, online: https://www.facebook.com/FestivalConFormazioni/videos/169004380402295/ (Accessed July 15, 2018).
     3. Gilles Clement, The Third Landscape, online: http://www.gillesclement.com/art-454-tit-The-Third-Landscape
(Accessed July 15, 2018).




                                  «Danza e ricerca. Laboratorio di studi, scritture, visioni», anno X, numero 10, 2018
                                                                                                  danzaericerca.unibo.it
                                                                         https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2036-1599/8758
398                                                                                                                  Ariadne Mikou




tion, Clement’s Third Landscape is employed in order to contain coexisting and diverse choreographic
practices whose experimental character is key to the evolution of the dance field.
      The Third Dance Landscape is an unbound and liquid territory where the concept of choreography
is problematized through transgressive and difficult-to-classify choreographic practices 4 . More speci-
fically, the Third Dance Landscape contains paradigms of choreographic practices that challenge our
perception of dance by «exhausting» 5 the concept of movement and the traditional aesthetics of the
dancing body. Conceptual choreographic practices 6 , such as those by Alessandro Sciarroni and Sil-
via Gribaudi as far as it concerns Italy, but also several projects of community dance, compose and
contaminate the diverse and heterogeneous territory of the Third Dance Landscape. Somewhere in-
between the horizontal choreographic topographies, community dance mutually informs and is being
informed by the dance landscapes of today. Examples include: the cathartic slow falling devised by the
British choreographer Rosemary Lee for Melt Down (2011) as a response to the death of loved ones;
the choreographic projects of Charlotte Spencer, such as Is This a Waste Land? (2017) and Walking
Stories (2013), which bind individuals in the course of score-based performances; the corporeal com-
positions of Italian choreographer Virgilio Sieni, which are based on the architecture of the gesture (a.
o. Agora, 2010-2013; La Cittadinanza del Corpo, 2016) and the embodiment of failure and success
against established aesthetic norms in Jerome Bel’s Gala (2015). These are only few of the examples
that make evident the diversity of community dance at an international level and its dialogue with
the Third Dance Landscape. Everyday bodies and alternative sites become the core material of these
choreographic practices that bind dancing communities temporarily or for the long term.
      Besides its artistic character, community dance is also associated to a demand – undoubtedly ur-
gent – for inclusivity or leisure inside educational or recreational contexts 7 . Community dance scholar
and principal investigator of the Dance for Parkinson’s project, Sara Houston, defines community dan-
ce as «an educational practice, a life-empowering formula, an artistic outlet, an enjoyable pastime or
even several of these definitions at the same time» 8 . For instance, in the British context, where com-
munity dance has been supported financially, institutionally and academically approximately since the
1970s, community dance is defined as a movement practice that opens dance to non-professionals and
becomes accessible to them. Through relational values such as «focus on participation, collaborative

      4. The third landscape is «il territorio che mette in evidenza il problema di definire coreografie i fenomeni più trasgressivi
e difficilmente classificabili». Alessandro Pontremoli, La Danza 2.0. Paesaggi Coreografici del Nuovo Millennio, Bari-Roma,
Laterza 2018, p. 111.
      5. Cfr. André Lepcki, Exhausting Dance. Performance and the Politics of Movement, New York, Routledge, 2006.
      6. «Molta di questa danza è stata definita concettuale e le è stata attribuita una condizione subculturale non molto
diversa da quella degli esponenti della medesima corrente operante nel modo dell’arte visuale». Alessandro Pontremoli, La
Danza 2.0. Paesaggi Coreografici del Nuovo Millennio, cit., p. 114.
      7. Diane Amans (edited by), An Introduction To Community Dance Practice, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2017.
      8. Sara Houston, Dance in the Community, in Diane Amans (edited by), An Introduction To Community Dance Practice,
cit., p. 12.
The Dynamics of an Expanding Friendship. Community Making in the Streets of Porto Marghera                                       399




relationships, inclusive practice, opportunities for positive experiences and celebration of diversity» 9 ,
dance is being democratized and disseminated to people who do not meet bodily, aesthetical, and in
general conventional standards that are associated with the right to exercise dance as profession. The
joy in the experience of dancing, and often its therapeutic potential, is both a driver and an outcome
of community dance inside educational, recreational and artistic contexts.
      Hovering between community dance and urban dance practice, Mar Gh’era. Un secolo in corsa
(Mar Gh’era, 2017/18) is a choreographic event that merits attention as it has much to offer to our
understanding of the Third Dance Landscape and its relationship with community dance. Mar Gh’era
(fig. 1) is a promenade performance that managed to transform a neglected industrial site into a place
of community bonding. The performing community that temporarily occupied this derelict site re-
calls Clement’s landscape, which anarchically invades sites constructed by humans but left neglected.
More specifically, Mar Gh’era is a project which was devised by the “non-mainstream” 10 – to use once
more Pontremoli’s words, which are relevant to the concept of the Third Dance Landscape – Vene-
tian choreographer Laura Boato. With a Degree in Philosophy and strong leadership skills, Boato is
an acknowledged female choreographer and dance curator with a growing reputation. The movement
language of Mar Gh’era – greatly informed by Boato’s exposure to Western codified techniques and
Somatics – contains strong corporeal imagery, pedestrian vocabulary and improvisation material in a
state of continuous research and evolution. The Mar Gh’era project involved more than one hundred
performers, along with an even larger audience (totalling 750 people on a rainy day!) and it took pla-
ce in the almost abandoned site of the industrial zone of Porto Marghera (the Marghera Port at the
outskirts of Venice). Although the participants of Mar Gh’era are a mixture of professional artists and
everyday people exposed to performing arts (dance, music and singing) as a non-vocational activity,
community building is not the goal or the outcome of an educational or recreational process, but the
condition from which the creation process emerges by taking advantage of the dynamics of a growing
and expanding friendship. Community building emerges out of the urgency to narrate the story of
a place that has affected the past and the present, and which continues to shape the future of the
community residing in the industrial site of Marghera.



Mar Gh’era. One hundred years compressed into one hundred minutes
      On the occasion of the commemoration of the establishment of the industrial zone of Marghera
one hundred years ago, a performing arts community was gradually built under the direction of the

     9. Diane Amans (edited by), An Introduction To Community Dance Practice, cit., p. 9
    10. The third ladscape is «una riserva ai margini della cultura mainistream, dove diverse specie di artisti, esiliati, trascurati
dal sistema, sperimentano e producono danza al di fuori degli schemi». Alessandro Pontremoli, La Danza 2.0. Paesaggi
Coreografici del Nuovo Millennio, p. xi.
400                                                                                                             Ariadne Mikou




Figura 1 – Mar Gh’era. Un secolo in corsa (Mar Gh’era, 2017/18). Dir. Laura Boato. Photo by Michele Toniolo.


choreographer Laura Boato in order to celebrate the history and the yet-to-become of an urban site that
has been very highly discussed by artists, authors and journalists, activists and politicians 11 . The per-
formance event, an urban promenade and inter-disciplinary performance, occupied artists as diverse as
contemporary dance performers (Laboratorio Danza Contemporanea, Gruppo Contact Improvisation
Venezia), traceurs 12 (Apta Parkour), musicians (Street Percurssion Marghera, Istituto Comprensivo
“Filippo Grimani”), actors (Farmacia Zoo:È) and singers (Coro Voci dal Mondo, StorieStorte). This
human landscape has been a well-integrated mixture of multi-cultural and multi-ethnic groups that
reside in Italy and native Italian dance students and professionals.
      Marghera was a controversial site that contained the tension and the friction between the Venetian
area that continues to be over-saturated by tourism and the need for industrialization. The choreogra-
phic event of Mar Gh’era (2017/18) is a project that reflects the history, the politics and the diversity of
the anthropological fabric that inhabited this conflicting site. Around the 60s, almost fifty years since
the construction of Marghera, which is currently nearly abandoned and half-demolished, the industrial

    11. A few artistic and literature examples that have the Port of Marghera as a central focus include: the documentary film
The Last Firebrands (by Manuela Pellarin – Enrico Soci, 2004); the research paper La Rinascita Della Comunita Cittadina di
Marghera by Anthony Candiello (2007, online: http://www.anthonycandiello.it/#articoli); Mortedison (1973), a happening
devised by Giovanni Rubino and Corrado Costa that was performed by workers who transported a crucified puppet wearing
a gas mask during an actual strike in Marghera; the poems of Antonella Barina (Madre Marghera 1967/2017, Helvetia
Editrice, Venezia, 2017) and Ferruccio Brugnaro; the film animation El Mostro. La Coraggiosa Storia di Gabriele Bortolozzo
(2015) directed by Lucio Schiavon and Salvatore Restivo and many other Venetian artists such as the painter Emilio Vedova
and the musician Luigi Nono.
    12. Traceurs in French or tracciatori in Italian are the dancers who practice parkour.
The Dynamics of an Expanding Friendship. Community Making in the Streets of Porto Marghera                                  401




zone encompassed «7 million square meters in size, 17 km of navigable canals, 24 km of waterfront,
32 km of roads, 117 km of railways, 200.000 Amperes of electrical power […], 25.000 workers» 13 . As
both an important national and international industrial site, the zone of Marghera has been a promise
and a “praxis” – evidence – of available labour, but also a site full of risks that derived from the lack of
or limited health insurance, the growing pollution and the illegal use of cancerous gas.
      The promenade dance performance of Mar Gh’era unfolds across 2km long train tracks that tra-
verse the industrial site of the port. A predefined and choreographic path across the Via dei Petroli
corresponds in chronological order to the big events that shaped the site’s history and its transition
from a place of dreams to a place of nightmares. Through poetic means, such as corporeal movemen-
ts, texts and sounds, the narration gradually unfolds. The opening scene, evoking the promise of the
Industrial Revolution, celebrates a version of the Manifesto of Futurists adapted by the director and
dramaturge Gianmarco Busetto who recites 14 : «We wish […] to destroy the fake Venice that is full of
gondolas and empty palaces […] we wish […] to destroy the Adriatic Sea» 15 . Busetto’s text goes on
to describe how the industrial site of Marghera was a place of concentrated hope for an improved way
of living that would render people independent from nature’s whims. Indeed, the transition from the
unpredictable and nature-dependent labour to machine-based initially brought stability in financial
income and benefits.
      As the performance unfolds, the personal stories of the workers – their everyday lives, their wor-
king conditions, their first demonstrations, the cancer that hit both workers and residents – are heard
or represented through a series of movement scenes. These are performed at times by large groups of
performers – such as the one where all the dancers gather in order to recall the proletarian demonstra-
tions that are depicted in Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s The Fourth Estate (1901) or the scene in which
dancers emulate the movement of the machine. At other times, the audience passes in front of intimate
scenes of duets or smaller groups. The narration of the personal, yet political, reflects each individual
associated with the site of Marghera. We hear: a song performed by the local female band StorieStorte
and based on Italo Calvino’s Canzone Triste (1958) about a couple who alternate their working shifts
and thus never manage to meet; the story of a father who urges his son to study in order not to end
up vomiting blood and dust due to working in the factory – a place that people gradually realise to be

    13. Manuela Pellarin – Enrico Soci, The Last Firebrands, cit.
    14. Marghera was born at the same time as the Manifesto of Futurists was written and the correspondence with the
original manifesto is evident: «Why should we look behind us, when we have to break in the mysterious portals of the
Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday» (Cfr. Exhibition of Works by the Italian Futurist Painters [With an Initial Manifesto
of Futurism by F.T. Marinetti], 1912, online: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/manifesto-of-futurism (Accessed July 29,
2018). Marghera reflects the zeitgeist of an era that is concerned with the release from the burden of history and the making
of space for the new.
    15. «Noi vogliamo […] distruggere la Venezia finta e vuota delle gondole e dei palazzi […] noi vogliamo […] rovinare
il mare Adriatico» (Personal Communication with the choreographer).
402                                                                                                              Ariadne Mikou




Figura 2 – Performers in swimming suits sunbathing surrounded by silos and factories. Photo by Michele
           Toniolo.


an incubator of slow death; the songs of Coro Voci dal Mondo, which narrate left-wing lyrics about
the first proletarian demonstrations in Marghera. We look at the choreographed paradox of a family
in swimsuits sunbathing in the midst of the industrial and deeply polluted site, between the silos and
the factories (fig. 2).
      Text, songs and dance supplement each other in order to narrate the story of the site and by
extension of the local people and more. Busetto claims that writing and speaking about Marghera is
not only an action that concerns the local, but Italy as a whole, and it offers a point of view that is
historic, political, anthropological and poetic 16 . In this embodied narration, Gabriele Bortolozzo, who
is the person who, against all odds, first revealed the ecological and health scandal that happened in
Marghera, receives a special mention. In the dedicated scene about his contribution, the use of the
bicycle wheels is twofold (fig. 4): one concerns Bortolozzo’s fatal accident in 1995 while he was riding
his bicycle, and the other evokes his belief about collaborative spirit as found in the metaphor that one
wheel cannot drive us anywhere unless there is at least another one 17 . Next, StorieStorte sing about the
first trials that covered the scandal that Bortolozzo together with other workers attempted to bring to
light, and which absolved the factories’ managers until approximately 1998. As the narration proceeds

    16. In Busetto’s words: «scrivere di Marghera, della sua storia, non significava parlare solo di chi è nato e cresciuto
qui: scrivere di Marghera significa parlare dell’Italia intera, da un punto di vista storico, politico, antropologico e poetico»
(interview for the editing-in-process documentary).
    17. Free translation from Italian: «una ruota sola non va da nessuna parte […] ma quanto ci vuole a far partite un
movimento?» (Personal Communication with the choreographer).
The Dynamics of an Expanding Friendship. Community Making in the Streets of Porto Marghera           403




Figura 3 – The numerous audience gathered to attend the promenade performance. Photo by Michele Toniolo.


and gets closer to the present time, the story comes nearly to its end with the Dow Chemical accident,
a large fire that occurred in 2002 and threatened to devastate even Venice. The end of the story about
Marghera as an ambiguous site between life and death concludes with the solo performance of the
dancer Carla Marazzato, and when a car passes over her body, an African pray of high energy is heard
from afar.
      Marazzato, still alive underneath the car, turns on a torch and a voice from a nearby out-of-order
telephone box describes the Marghera of 2117 when nature (the Third Landscape of the introductory
lines) has besieged the factories. The Marghera of 2117 is again beautiful, clean and unpolluted thanks
to a successful ecological plan devised and applied by the repentant humanity; the lagoon is full of
fish and nobody has cancer any more. The epilogue is totally unexpected. At the end of the walking
journey which began in a heavy industrial landscape and which concludes next to the Venetian lagoon
– there where nature reclaims its space and which looks almost like the vision of Marghera of 2117 –,
the audience should have encountered a pregnant woman dancing to the sound of a lullaby and should
have looked from afar at the illuminated Venice. But unexpected heavy rain cancels the pre-planned
and pre-choreographed scene. The sudden rain brings total chaos and urges a cathartic and collective
cry; nature together with dance performance creates a universe that participates in something powerful:
a journey in which a community, performers and audience, begin to share a past and a present.
404                                                                                                 Ariadne Mikou




                 Figura 4 – The scene dedicated to Gabrielle Bortolozzo. Photo by Michele Toniolo



Mar Gh’era & the layers of community
        The performers of Mar Gh’era joined the choreographic experiment by responding numerously to
a call for participants that was immediately spread from mouth to mouth or by spontaneously expres-
sing their interest in the project. A series of observations around the characteristics of the performing
community are worth discussing. These observations, which are derived from the following questions
are helpful to understand what community dance is and/or what it could be:

  — What is a dancing or dance community? What is community dance?
  — How and why is a community built? How does it expand or contract?
  — What does a community share? What do members of a community have in common? What
          binds a community together?

        Much debate, especially in the British context, has been going on about segregating community
dance as a separate category from the realm of professional dance. As Houston observes, community
dance is commonly defined as a «participatory activity that is done by amateurs and often led by
professionals» 18 . This segregation usually places professional dance on a high scale and it negatively
affects the appreciation of dance performed by amateurs. When considering how fluid the borders
between community and professional dance can be, this definition becomes quite problematic. Who

      18. Sarah Houston, Dance in the Community, cit., p. 11.
The Dynamics of an Expanding Friendship. Community Making in the Streets of Porto Marghera                                405




are considered amateurs and who are defined as professionals? Maya Deren, a versatile figure of Avant-
Garde film, who transgressed dance, poetry, writing and anthropology, makes a distinction between the
professional and the amateur, emphasizing the fact that an amateur is one «who does something for the
love of the thing rather than for economic reasons or necessity» 19 . Through this lens and taking into
account the etymological root of the word amateur from the Latin verb “amare” (to love), a person who
loves an activity or his/her profession can also be an amateur, although (s)he may receive compensation
or not.
      In the case of Mar Gh’era, all the participants, amateurs-as-professionals and professionals-as-
amateurs, were un-paid 20 , yet they were still enthusiastic about performing in this massive event. Due
to the fact that receiving proper financial compensation is a major issue for those involved professional-
ly in the Arts, there should be a greater need to join a community project that overcomes the necessity
of livelihood. The commitment with Mar Gh’era began as an enjoyable leisure activity which ended
up being nourished by deeper feelings and motivations. Gradually during the year long process, the
participants started to feel part of the story of Marghera and responsible for the transmission of its sto-
ry that often remains a social taboo. These participants gathered in order to demonstrate, through the
form of an urban promenade performance, about the precarious possession of labour, the unequal and
dangerous labour conditions and the raising of awareness about an impending ecological disaster. An
urban promenade performance that is motivated by such urgencies shares a close affiliation to political
marches and protests, and through this lens it has the potential to become political 21 . Dancer, scho-
lar and social activist Randy Martin successfully argued that «dance’s capacity to mobilize performers
and audiences offers us an embodied model of politics in motion» 22 . The streets as urban spaces of
circulation are places of concentrated polyphony and diversity, where political and social actions, and
conflicts may take place. However, the choreographic path in the streets of Marghera is a soliciting of
perambulation, a route-finding device through a mapped space and a traced history for the happening

     19. Bruce R. McPherson (edited by), Essential Deren. Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, Documentext, New
York 2005, p. 17.
     20. The lack of compensation was not an intentional curatorial and choreographic choice, but it derived from the lack
of available financial support.
     21. For a full argumentation regarding the political dimension of dance, please consult Randy Martin’s Critical Moves:
Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina & London 1998); Mark Franko’s Dan-
ce and the Political in Franco, Susanne – Marina Nordera (Eds) Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research (Routledge,
London & New York 2007); Alexandra Kolb’s Dance and Politics (P. Lang, Oxford-New York 2011); Stacey Prickett’s Embo-
died Politics: Dance, Protest and Identities (Dance Books, Hampshire 2013). Furthermore, in Choreographies of Protest, Susan
Leigh Forster examines from the perspective of the dance scholar the non-violent actions of physical intervention, such as
sit-ins, walk-ins and pray-ins. She asks «what kind of significance and impact does the collection of bodies make in the midst
of its social surround? How does the choreography theorize corporeal, individual, and social identity? […] what do they
(the bodies) share that allows them to move with one another?» (Susan Leigh Forster, Choreographies of Protest in «Theatre
Journal», vol. 55, n. 3, 2003, pp. 395-412, p. 397, online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25069277). This is a choreographic
point of view in the analysis of social movements.
     22. Randy Martin in Judith Hamera, Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference, and the Connection in the Global
City, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2007, p. 3.
406                                                                                                            Ariadne Mikou




of a poetic and peaceful demonstration. The community of mobile and mobilized spectators is empa-
thetically engaged in the activation of the past, and history and future are constructed through their
feet.
        The corporeal story-telling of the architectural site of Marghera spans a time frame of 100 years
and situates Marghera Port as a contradictory site. Not dissimilar to the Tamburi district of Taranto,
the Ilva steel plant and other international cases 23 , Marghera was a promise for a better future and yet it
has been a site for slow death. Hundreds of people were employed in the factories of the industrial zones
and also hundreds of them died from insufficient and carcinogenic working and living conditions. As
the interviews for the editing-in-process documentary 24 of Mar Gh’era reveal, all the participants of
the choreographic experiment had a relative, a family member or a friend who was a worker in Porto
Marghera and had died due to cancer. The one hundred performers, empowered by a sort of increased
“cultural citizenship” 25 and a shared empathy for the loss of their loved ones, were joined in order to
celebrate the possibility to remember a story and to imagine and envision the yet-to-come social change
that is driven by local and individual actions. Citizenship as the responsibility towards the environment
and as the freedom to claim the social rights of the self and the other were the thrusting forces for this
poetic demonstration 26 .
        Besides the common purpose of narration and peaceful demonstration that motivates the parti-
cipants to gather together, there is an additional element that binds them together: the fact of being
“local”. But, what does it mean to be “local” in a world of high mobility and a continuous flow of bo-
dies? Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai contends in Modernity At Large that locality is ephemeral and
not much concerned with spatial and geographical areas and borders. He views locality as «a complex
phenomenological quality, constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the
technologies of interactivity, and the relativity of contexts» 27 . Therefore, locality may be viewed as a
process of building social bonds also through memories, public and private, that are being shared and
created in a continuum of processes that take place in the present. Beppa Casarin, the director of Coro
Voci dal Mondo, which participated in the project of Mar Gh’era (fig. 5), states that «making memory is
to create common roots for the present and the future of all of us» (interview for the editing-in-process

    23. I refer to cases such as the Chernobyl disaster (1986) in Ukraine, the mining disaster (1972) in Rhodesia, now named
Zimbabwe, and others.
    24. This is a documentary about the creation process and the final product of Mar Gh’era. Un secolo in corsa (2017/18)
that was commissioned by the choreographer Laura Boato to film and theatre director Giulio Boato. The documentary is
currently in the phase of editing.
    25. Cfr. Nick Stevenson, Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Questions, Open University Press, Maidenhead 2003.
    26. Other international projects that awake a sense of citizenship and incite civil dialogue and action are Sparrow’s End
(1997) by Jo Kreiter, a site-specific and community project in a public space frequented by drug dealers and users, and The
Ivye Project (1994) by Tamar Rogoff, a project in Ivye, a small town in Belarus, engaging as performers Holocaust survivors
and their families.
    27. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis-London 1996, p. 178.
The Dynamics of an Expanding Friendship. Community Making in the Streets of Porto Marghera                                  407




                Figura 5 – Coro Voci Dal Mondo. Dir. Beppa Casarin. Photo by Michele Toniolo


documentary of Mar Gh’era). Therefore, being local is not identified by the cultural and national ori-
gin and residency, but by the ephemeral sharing of “now”; the individual present that constructs the
collective future. Through this lens, locality is perceived dynamically and it adapts an elastic and fluid
dimension, so that its expansion or contraction depends on the ebb and flow of the remaining, but
also incoming and out-coming population (natives, immigrants and refugees).
      In the choreographic experiment of Mar Gh’era, the story of the industrial site gradually unravels
through the spoken words, the sounds and the movement that narrate how this architectural site has
impacted people’s lives. We are used to imagining and perceiving architecture as a discipline that is
concerned with space design, disregarding the fact that architecture is responsible for the relationships
among people which are fostered by the spaces they inhabit. The relationships between the dwellers
and the dwelled that may be perceived as a choreographic intervention is at the core of humanity
and community building. Architecture is not only about physical limits and spatial demarcation, but
also about possibilities for interaction (and the sensing of locality as Appadurai suggests). Architecture
remains incomplete until the body can turn the abstract geometric space of design into an ephemeral
and variable place that is lived, inhabited, used, altered, recognized and remembered through everyday
and ordinary interaction 28 . Mar Gh’era addresses the living 29 dimension of the industrial site of the

    28. Cfr. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley 1984.
    29. Architecture is a place that affects and is being affected by the people who inhabit and interact with it. Through
this lens, living refers to the ability of architecture to change, evolve and disappear through time. “Living” is also in tandem
with the Lefebvrian notion of appropriation that renders the experience of architectural space and its adaptation un-separated
408                                                                                                             Ariadne Mikou




port: the political and everyday events that took place during the last 100 years.
      Architecture has been traditionally re-membered and archived through textual and visual archives,
such as static diagrams, blueprints, and 3D animation, all of which are inclined towards capturing
architecture as an idealised moment of conception «before people, dirt, rain and history move in» 30 .
These are archiving tools that freeze architecture in time and disregard the need to address the living
dimension of space. Therefore, considering the train of thought that is concerned with the archiving
of architecture as place 31 , it is necessary to find supplementary ways of archiving architecture as living,
and thus through corporeal movement as «it is by means of the body that space is perceived, lived – and
produced» 32 . In the choreographic experiment of Mar Gh’era, the promenade narrates how and why
the industrial site has affected the lives of the workers and their families, the communities associated
with the specific site. In this way, the performance becomes an archival testimony of the factories as
contested sites where riots, solidarity, community spirit and communism are often interlaced.
      As the art critic and historian Hal Foster proposes, the archival – what is related to archive – is
«concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces» 33 . He also suggests that the archival
«not only draws on informal archives but produces them as well, and does so in a way that underscores
the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private» 34 .
The promenade performance on the industrial site of Marghera, as a sort of archival art, is based on
found objects, texts, oral histories and movements invented and re-assembled in new ways. Myth,
fiction and facts create an archaeological site of combined construction and excavation where history is
produced and archaeology is practised «less as the discovery of the past and more in terms of different
relationships with what is left of the past» 35 . In this format, the abandoned and ruined site of Marghera
is temporarily activated through the sound of the words and the bodies in motion that trace its history.
All of them they are actively engaged in a dialogue between the present, the past and the future. In that
respect, the site of Marghera is archived through the dialectics of space, time, body and movement that
produce architecture-as-event 36 .
      The architectural history expert Iain Borden comments that «architectural historians limit their
conceptions of architectural space to the space of the designed building-object – a fetishism that era-

from the living communities inhabiting this space through time (Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by D.
Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, Oxford-Cambridge 1991).
   30. Jeremy Till, Thick Time: Architecture and the Traces of Time, in Iain Borden – Jane Rendell (edited by), InterSections:
Architectural Histories and Critical Theories, Routledge, London & New York 2000, p. 286.
   31. Cfr. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, cit.
   32. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, cit., p. 162.
   33. Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, in «October», Fall 110, 2004, p. 5.
   34. Ibidem.
   35. Gabriella Giannachi – Nick Kaye – Michael Shanks, Archaeologies of Presence: Art, Performance and the Persistence of
Being, Routledge, London & New York 2012, p. 2.
   36. Cfr. Bernard Tschumi, Architecture & Disjunction, The MIT Press, Cambridge-London 1996.
The Dynamics of an Expanding Friendship. Community Making in the Streets of Porto Marghera                  409




                                    Figura 6 – Group photo by Michele Toniolo.


ses social relations and wider meanings» 37 . Mar Gh’era may fail to reproduce the architecture of the
industrial site according to its static architectural and diagrammatic conception, but it succeeds in
providing a series of individualised events that occurred between architecture and its original users.
More specifically, Mar Gh’era captures personalized experiences of architecture-as-event – in this case
the experience of architecture as a lived place – which in turn generate new experiences as events: the
spectators’ encounter with the interactions of the performing bodies and the found site, the archived
material, the objects, the personal stories and the texts. In this way, the performance community that
awakes and constructs a collective memory is embraced and enlarged by the community of spectators
who are drawn to the site to applaud their friends, just for curiosity or for encouragement. In the course
of this promenade performance, the audience – the mobile and mobilized spectators – forms a second
layer of community, and together with the performers they all build a larger one.



Instead of conclusion. Dance community versus community dance
      In this text, I have attempted to shed light on a site-specific, urban promenade performance which
gained visibility only in the region of Veneto in Italy. The lesson from this choreographic experiment
lies in the fact that a sense of augmented cultural citizenship brought together almost one hundred
performers for the production of a massive event. Private and collective memory became the source

   37. Ian Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City. Architecture and the Body, Berg, Oxford 2001, p. 7.
   410                                                                                           Ariadne Mikou




   for devising a poetic demonstration about urgent ecological and social issues. A dance community,
   stylistically diverse but still evocative of Pontremoli’s choreographic landscapes of today was joined by
   other communities that use different means of expression (music and voice). All these sub-communities
   formed a non-homogenous, intergenerational and multi-cultural community of performers and spec-
   tators. Friendship as a way to support each other and circulate information for the creation of the
   project, friendship as an outcome of locality and friendship as a prerequisite for a community-making
   process were fundamental for the accomplishment of the project.
           The choreographic project in Marghera is an opportunity for reconsidering the definition of com-
   munity dance beyond the binary between amateurs and professionals or inclusivity and exclusivity.
   Rather, it is an opportunity to rethink community in broader terms. As sociologist Day Graham ob-
   serves, the essential meaning of community refers «to those things which people have in common,
   which bind them together, and give them a sense of belonging with one another» 38 . Performing arts –
   although comprised by fundamentally different forms – is a common language among the participants
   of Mar Gh’era. Furthermore, historical and political forces, a collective spirit of activism, an evolving
   and elastic sense of locality and citizenship as responsibility towards the other and the future through
   the actions of the present are the binding elements of this expanding community.
           As the vibes of kinaesthetic empathy that were evoked by Mar Gh’era gradually fade away through
   time, what is the current materiality or immateriality of this community? Mar Gh’era was a one-off
   event resulting from a year-long rehearsal process. As the participants have dispersed to their individual
   everyday routines, can we still speak today of the performing arts community? A community needs a
   regular practice and a sort of “everydayness” in order to maintain its bonding. A community is simul-
   taneously something alive and contingent. The specific community might have disappeared, but for
   all of them (participants and audience), the choreographic project of Mar Gh’era has been a life mile-
   stone that hopefully will motivate future actions of social activism and other social reconfigurations of
   solidarity and togetherness.


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– Boato, Laura, Text to Ariadne Mikou, 26th of June, 2018.

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         38. Dan Graham, Community and Everyday Life, Routledge, London 2006, p. 1.
   The Dynamics of an Expanding Friendship. Community Making in the Streets of Porto Marghera         411




– Day, Graham, Community and Everyday Life, Routledge, London 2006.

– De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley 1984.

– Foster, Hal, An Archival Impulse, in «October», Fall 110, 2004, pp. 3-22.

– Foster, Susah Leigh, Choreographies of Protest, in «Theatre Journal», vol. 55, n. 3, 2003, pp. 395-412,
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– Tschumi, Bernard, Architecture & Disjunction, The MIT Press, Cambridge-London 1996.

   Sitography

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  thonycandiello.it/#articoli (Accessed July 15, 2018).
   412                                                                                       Ariadne Mikou




– Clement, Gilles, The Third Landscape, online: http://www.gillesclement.com/art-454-tit-The-Third-
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   Filmography and Works Cited

– Bel, Jérôme, Gala, 2015 [Performance].

– Boato, Giulio, Editing-in-process Documentation of Mar Gh’era. Un Secolo In Corsa, 2018.

– Boato, Laura, Mar Gh’era. Un secolo in corsa, 2017/18 [Promenade Performance].

– Calvino, Italo, Canzone Triste, 1958 [Poem].

– Lee, Rosemary, Melt Down, 2011 [Choreographic score].

– Pellarin, Manuela – Soci, Enrico, The Last Firebrands, 2004 [Documentary].

– Pellizza da Volpedo, Giuseppe, The Fourth Estate, 1901 [Oil Painting].

– Rubino, Giovanni – Corrado, Costa, Mortedison, 1973 [Happening].

– Schiavon, Lucio – Restivo, Salvatore, El Mostro. La Coraggiosa Storia di Gabriele Bortolozzo, 2015
  [Animation].

– Sieni, Virgilio, Agora, 2010-2013 [Performance].

– Sieni, Virgilio, La Cittadinanza del Corpo, 2016 [Performance].

– Spencer, Charlotte, Is This a Waste Land?, 2017 [Participatory Choreography].

– Spencer, Charlotte, Walking Stories, 2013 [Participatory Choreography].
