PAESAGISCO
Dancing the landscape: an outer drama

Acting with the landscape, passing through it, becoming part of it.
One track left on the walk, one on the memory.
Acting inside and outside at the same time.
A narrative synesthesia on movement.
An experiential journey in search of rising tales ready to be picked.
To perceive, to feel, to imagine: the body becomes a wave, a mythical story, a narrative map.
I am a landscape in progress.

PAESAGISCO is an Italian neologism composed by PAESAGGIO (landscape) and AGISCO (I act).
PAESAGISCO is a journey workshop of landscape drama.
It's articulated by a walk in which the participants are led to discover the creative potentialities of territory crossing.
The workshop, focused on the sensorial aspects, looks like a walk in the open air by a guided itinerary, divided in stops and realized in group.
Different exercises are elaborated in each stop to increase the perceptions and to transform them in tales of the present.
In the same time we act the landscape and the landscape acts to us: it's activated a sort of ecological circulation in which the body and the environment become part of the landscape aesthetic.
It's a training to create an echo of a place, starting from oneself, reverberating the sharpest aspects: a colour, a sound, a smell, an atmosphere.
PAESAGISCO is a workshop of inner and outer exploration, by contemporaneous presence of 3 elements: Movement, Perception, Narration.
It's a creative lecture of the landscape by the observation and the body immersion.
To become careful lectors before than writers of a space and its silent stories, freeing images, words, movements.

Dancing the landscape means to pick the synchronic and formal elements of potential choreography in progress.
The outer drama is the systematic elaboration of a tale made by present connections.

"Walking means open to the world. The act of walking takes back man to happy awareness of own existence, immerses in an active form of meditation that stimulates the full participation of all senses. It's an experience that sometimes changes us, makes us more inclined to join in time than to subjugate us to the hurry that rules life of the contemporary man. Walking is to live by the body, for brief or long time. To find comfort in the streets, in the tracks, in the woods doesn't excuse us to assume the responsibilities that even more regard us about the disorder of the world; but it allows to take breath, to improve our senses and rekindle the curiosity. Walking often is an expedient to take contact with ourselves".
David, Le Breton, Il mondo a piedi, Milano, Feltrinelli, 2001, p. 9

HOW IT WORKS
The goal of the workshop is the creation of the narrative map of own path by the creative elaboration of the landscape immersion.
The experience is articulated by the alternation of walks and stops, moments of collection during the transit and moments of sharing and elaboration of picked materials.
During the act of walking the body sensorial activation reawakens the memory of past events associated to the present of the landscape and the sequence of steps stimulates images, words, stories.
The punctuation is inserted in the movement in the space that obligates us to slow down, to stop, to observe a particular, to give way to someone who arrives, to don't lose the balance, to accelerate and to take breath.
The immersion in the landscape is structured by the flux of going, the metamorphosis suggested by the look, the being all one with nature: the landscapes starting to be background becomes environment and context to new dramaturgy.
It's a map composed by images, memories, movements, texts, that is mainly written on to the body and it can be passed down, formalized, shared.

During the walks the participant is invited to "act in the landscape" by exercises and practices of embodiment and translation in creative expression as indicated by the conductors.
The stops are the formalization of the creative-perception experience, of its sharing, of its to become concrete shape by words and movements.
At the end of the path each participant will have composed its creative map, generating a layered picture of images, words, sounds, emotions, in accord with the environment, in relation with the inner and outer landscapes, creating an holistic map in progress.

SKILLS
During the journey workshop dance and theatre technique will be used but not only: original methodologies elaborated by the performing practice of Senza Confini Di Pelle will be also used.
Dance, for instance, is both an aesthetic instrument and a kinetic one: it can be suggested by the sinuous trunk of a secular olive tree, by the plants fold by the wind, by the fast or still clouds, by the earth cracks, by a lizard under the sun. Dance is both to embody a dynamic imagine and to reproduce it translated by the body movement. 
The perceptive exercises, instead, are used to open the body to its sensorial faculties, putting the sight in second order: the perception of the space is stimulated by the sound, the scents, the surfaces. The deep sensorial practices like the deep listening bring the body out of itself, beyond its skin borders, extending until where the sound arrives. I’m until my senses arrive.
The use of storytelling is on 2 levels: stimulation and production. The stimulation to tell stories is done by the narration of tales that belong to that peculiar places, connecting the topos with the own logos of many communities in an indissoluble way. These are tales on the culture of that community, they could be battles, wars, legends, mythology tales or simple narrative inventions in order to mark a land property.
The production of stories is suggested by the steps during the walk, where this act of walking is itself a narration: by walking, the thoughts connect themselves to the landscape and from the solipsistic experience the past rises in the short story form.

Are also used some experience of the Land Art as those of Richard Long in which to leave a track of own transit becomes an aesthetic ecological form that reconciles culture and nature giving value to art as instrument of becoming conscious of human behaviour.
Another basic expertise used is the Adhesion Methodology developed by Senza Confini Di Pelle through the Add Up Project between Europe and Brazil since 2011. The core of this practice is the body adhesion on to the environment utilizing a wide taxonomy that ranges from concrete to abstract adhesions. Through this methodology the body absorbs the shapes of the landscapes introjecting them to use as motive and generator of creative dynamics, of landscape dances.

OUTCOME
The outcome of the project is articulated in Workshop, Installation and Performance.

Workshop > Series of one day workshop during a week. At the end of each workshop the participants leave their impressions by images, texts and objects collected during the path. The workshop will be free of pay.

Installation > The main and visible result: a creative-sensorial map of the impressions of the evironment. It will be composed with all the materials found with the workshops.

Performance > A live performance will be presented in the opening installation and will be performed by workshop participants who will tell some tales about the culture of the site.

PARTICIPANTS
From a minimum of 5 to a maximum of 25 per workshop.
The participation will be free and open to everyone.
The participants will have to leave some concrete materials of their experience (images, texts, objects).