THE LABORATORY: WHAT IS PLAYGROUND?

Playground is a free workshop led by the Opera Bianco company and aimed at people over 60 and children between 8 and 12 years old. The workshop will take place from September 16th to 21st, with a public performance on the last day, at Nicholas Green Park in Bologna.

Through play, dance, and landscape, Playground aims to build a dialogue between bodies and the natural and urban landscape of Bologna, thus enhancing the encounter between professional performers, children, and people over 60. The shared movement practices are inspired by Pieter Bruegel’s painting “Children’s Games” and are suitable for everyone, with or without experience. Bodies with different rhythms, dynamics, and postures will mix in an aesthetic and ritualistic experience, generating a multitude of landscapes and dances.

THE PERFORMATIVE OUTCOME

The workshop will end on September 21st with a public performance at Nicholas Green Park (entrance on Via Niccolò dell’Abate) at 6 p.m.

Each participant will contribute their own perspective to create a unique vision of the body in dialogue with the landscape, bringing the result of this process to the final performance: the construction of a “landscape within a landscape” in which the participants give shape, through gesture, to a collective choreography that reflects the richness and variety of the games explored and the bodies in action. An event open to the public, in which the public space is transformed into a poetic and participatory place.

THE THEME

Playground focuses on the body, brings attention to the relationship between dance and landscape and the encounter between performers, children and people over 60. Bodies with different rhythms, dynamics and postures mingle in an aesthetic and ritual experience, generating a multitude of landscapes and dances.

It investigates how each person’s ability to observe the landscape can contribute to a different view of his or her body and, conversely, how this can help develop new relationships with the environment.

Playground’s choreographic research takes inspiration from Bruegel’s painting and Tarkovsky’s cinema. The final composition emerges from the confrontation between the movement of bodies and the complexity of planes and volumes of space.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

The workshop is free of charge.

It starts on September 16 and ends on September 21 with a public performance outcome.

It is open to a group of 10 children ages 8 to 12 and a group of 10 people over 60.

No experience in art or performance is necessary to participate.

Participation in all days of the workshop is required.

For information and registration: laboratori@genderbender.it

CALENDAR

September 16th and 17th
9:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.: workshop for people over 60
5:00 p.m. – 7:15 p.m.: workshop for children (ages 8-12)

September 18th and 19th
5:00 p.m. – 7:15 p.m.: workshop for everyone

September 20th
time to be determined: dress rehearsal

September 21st
from 2:30 p.m.: dress rehearsal
6:00 p.m.: show starts

THE OPERA BIANCO COMPANY

Opera Bianco is an artistic research group founded by Marta Bichisao, dancer and choreographer, and Vincenzo Schino, director and visual artist. Since 2006 it has chosen the theatrical universe to explore dance, performing art, visual arts and video by activating processes of community involvement. The multiplicity of languages he feeds on creates immersive performance experiences, in which challenging the traditional form of fruition offers audiences alternative postures, visions and points of view.

Among the themes on which he focuses his artistic investigation is the dialectic between the comic and the tragic in the relationship between performer and stage and between human and universe. The greatest inspiration comes from the world of painting and cinema, used as an entrance to choreographic research to question the boundary between composition and reality, between foreground and landscape.

Playground is part of Bologna Estate 2025, the playbill of activities promoted and coordinated by the Municipality and the Metropolitan City of Bologna-Tourist Territory Bologna-Modena, and is supported under the program agreement between the Municipality of Bologna and MiC Direzione Generale Spettacolo for live performance activities in peripheral areas.