Radicality of languages and transdisciplinarity only the characteristics that unite the best dance and theater performances and shows seen by us in the past 12 months.

Our must-sees 2022 among performance, dance, theater: 10 of the national and international shows and artistic projects that marked the year that is about to end, presented in Italy and abroad, that impressed us the most. Placed side by side seemingly asystematically, with different formats and scales, the reported works are linked by a focus on the radicality of languages, a vocation for transdisciplinarity and a contemporary vision. Not a ranking, but an overview among well-known names and small rarities to reconstruct and note down some must-haves of the past year and go looking for them in the future one.

A liquid universe, where to suspend time and float in a mesmerized space. Mirrored carpets refract an iridescent pain, a languid, dilated ecstasy that floods the walls and trusses of the Artificerie Almagià in Ravenna. Opalescent shimmers color the space, releasing and changing gradients, enveloping the room as if in a single surface. At the ends two tongues of light extend upward, as if to pronounce the meaning of ascent. Paradiso is a place, a context of relationship, a space of waiting, of possibility. Bodies cross, bodies sit, bodies walk and twirl, bodies trace the space always with unprecedented solutions, in a wandering that no longer has a destination, sufficient to itself, like the harmony of a song. Between staying and changing, bystanders are invited to take their place in the space and share it, to move it, to float between happenings. Inspired by the Paradiso Dante's long duration group performance nanou, visual artist Alfredo Pirri who curated the scene and the composer and musician Bruno Dorella who created the soundtrack, embodies two of Cantica's signature motifs: the diffusion of light and the presence of sound. Laconic the joy and grace of this Paradiso, furrowed by twirls and trajectories of dancers and dancers, on the choreographies conceived by Marco Valerio Amico and Rhuena Bracci, who traverse the space with lightness, extension, rapidity. Sometimes even power, as in the actions of Bracci herself, who seems to glow, to dazzle, among the other presences as a companion in splendor.