Danzare all'Aperto. Pionieri e pioniere della danza moderna

ystery does it transmit? Few, like Rainer Maria Rilke, have grasped so profoundly the force and fascination of the ancient theater as an empty space—a locus for the manifestation of the invisible.Writing around 1910, Rilke recalled his visit to the Roman theater of Orange in Provence: “It was in the theater of Orange... I entered and found myself among fallen columns and small flowering mallows, but only for a moment did they obscure the open shell of the stepped seating, which lay there like an immense concave sundial. I made my way toward it without hesitation. As I climbed through the rows of steps, I felt myself diminishing within the space that surrounded me. There, in that great semicircle, reigned an existence that was expectant, empty, absorbing: all events took place beyond —gods and destiny. And from outside, if one looked far above, there came—lightly, over the crest of the wall—the eternal, solemn entrance of the heavens. That hour, I now understand, excluded me forever from our contemporary theaters. What role could they still play? Let us be honest: we have no theater, just as we have no God; to possess such things, one must be a community.” The Vito Di Bernardi’s contribution retraces the utopia of a form of dance that is both individual and communal, practiced in open-air spaces—ancient theaters, forests, beaches, countryside, and village squares—through the work of several key figures in the history of free and modern dance during the first half of the twentieth century (Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Rudolf Laban), and through the more recent legacy of American dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin (1920–2021), a pioneer of postmodern dance.