The delicacy of approaching is not for the eyes.
Like disoriented lovers, we wander
with gentle pretenses and powerful intuitions,
celebrating the salvation of feeling in advance.
We are erotic clairvoyance.
Antidote to dark times, we whisper an unbreakable wish:
to smile at each other, to recognize us,
and if a desire exists, to surrender.
(Our power: to feel pleasure)
Placebo Dances is a broad investigation on and towards Pleasure.
It is a tendency, an inclination toward a condition of openness, connection, rest, bliss and enchantment that might favour pleasure toward oneself and others so to question the situatedness of our bodies and their positioning in the world.
In Placebo Dances we look for postures that are shaken by desire, that gently disrupt the bodies and make them waver, to find a closeness that makes erotic our being in the world.
Pleasure as salvation in times of catastrophe.
Placebo Dances, by questioning the positioning of bodies in the world, lends itself to become an open relational device to be developed in different forms: workshops and moments of sharing with the communities (professionals and non-prof and people interested in the topic) through both a body based approach and a theoretical level; performative moments and rituals to generate a connection between observed and observer, between moving and static bodies, seeking for closeness and intimacy.
Credits
idea Flavia Zaganelli
performance, research María Durbá, Lucrezia Rosellini, Flavia Zaganelli
choreographic assistant Agnese Gabrielli, Federica Iannuzzi
sound Krzysztof Bagiński
lights Fabrizio Piro
production Associazione L'Altra, Flavia Zaganelli
mentoring Silvia Bottiroli, Maria F. Scaroni
promotion in dialogue with Irene Rossini
hybrid support Valentina Felicetti, Elena Mattioli, DAS, Francesca Siracusa, Agnese Banti, Genny Gennaio
The project won Boarding Pass Plus Dance 2023 a mobility grant in collaboration with Santarcangelo Festival (Italy), Moving in November Festival (Finland) and IIC Helsinki and Liisa Pentii+Co Studio.
Sustained by Santarcangelo Festival, Lavanderia a Vapore nell'ambito del progetto residenze coreografiche, Alchemilla, Graner, IIC Barcellona, Dom Utopii, IIC Cracovia, Fuoriprogramma Festival, Altes Finanzamt-Berlin.
all'interno di LANDING, progetto sostenuto dal Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale realizzato da Santarcangelo Festival. Si ringrazia l’area Export di ATER Fondazione per il prezioso supporto
Accessibility
Immersive performance in close proximity between audience and performers
Predominantly floor seating on cushions, some elevated seating available.
People with reduced mobility welcome.
Premiere
Santarcangelo Festival 10, 11, 12 July 2025
A Relief for Our Nervous System by Girts Estere Dubults
Satori.lv
(automatic translation form Latvian)
"...We look at one another and notice the relationships between the three bodies. They hear one another, follow each other’s exhalations and respond with movement. Gradually, the breathing quiets and the bodies surrender to a continuous circular movement that encompasses their backs...The repetition of the movements encourages us to relax. The atmosphere becomes predictable and therefore safe. The circling of the spine is like a massage for all the nervous systems in the room...the pleasure offered by movement that has nothing to prove and owes nothing to anyone....It seems as though the room tilts slightly...Did we hug?"
Dance, a practice of emancipation by Silvia Bottiroli
"...Placebo Dances thus opens the space – both the material space of practice and encounter, and the imaginative space of what exists as potential – to the shared practice of joyful passions, and reaffirms a fundamental trait of dance: its being a practice of emancipation, of self-invention, of weaving collective dimensions in which new perceptions and different sensations take form."
Selected Press
Il corpo come rituale tra estasi e resistenza. Placebo Dances di Flavia Zaganelli.
Emilia Romagna Cultura e Spettacolo. July 2025.
"...Not a dance in the traditional sense, but a living, sensory device that traverses the concepts of pleasure, care and presence. In an age in which the body is often reduced to performance or consumption, Zaganelli redeems it and transforms it into relational matter, capable of welcoming, stimulating and destabilising. Placebo Dances is an invitation to be. To breathe together. To let oneself be traversed by that which cannot be said with words..."
Un delicato vortice di energia di Sofia Zecchinelli
Teatro e critica LAB, June 2024
“...I blink and my gaze is completely captured by the bodies of the three dancers (in addition to Zaganelli Lucrezia Rosellini and Maria Durbà ), who, resting softly on the floor, had already hovered the circular, hypnotic and elegant movement of their kisses, which would never leave me again, not even at the end of the performance. The young women seemed alone in our midst as they danced around the hearth of their own main heroic center. A feminine and masculine motion at once: a resourceful welcome, a defiant grace. The more their kisses draw free movements, the more mine feel the weight and constraints of a universal society and culture that perhaps continue to fear this...”