Stepping into the two rooms of the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria where gruppo nanou's Fuori quadro unfolds, one feels compelled to search for the "right angle" from which to look. The presence of performers Carolina Amoretti, Marina Bertoni and Andrea Dionisi strikes suddenly, encountered while moving through the pinacoteca's spaces with a faint anticipatory shiver — rooms already dense with other presences: altarpieces, sculptures, masterworks by Umbrian painters of the Renaissance and medieval periods, and the rooftops and bell towers of Perugia's historic centre glimpsed from the building's third floor — all pressing their claim on our attention.

The dance — representing here a new chapter in a "co-writing" project that the Ravenna-based company has been developing for some years across various art galleries throughout Italy — does not burst in, does not announce itself with a beginning and an end in the manner of conventional theatrical mechanics, but instead quietly lodges itself within the aesthetic exceptionality of already charged spaces, and simultaneously within the ordinary afternoon rhythm of a museum visit.

This disposition toward "adaptation" — or in any case toward a dialogue inflected by a kind of respectful enchantment with the surrounding context — is evident in the chromatic correspondences: arranged across two rooms set perpendicularly to one another —the square niche dedicated to the Madonna del pergolato by Giovanni Boccati, smaller and lit only by its doorways, and the long connecting hall leading to the celebrated perspectival depths of the Polittico di Sant’Antonio by Piero della Francesca, onto which two tall windows open — the performance areas are bounded by carpets of vivid blue, while the greens and golds of the dancers' costumes and of the oversized sheets of fabric filling the scene are in perfect harmony with the dominant tones of the religious altarpieces.

Yet it is precisely through these sheets of fabric that, from the very first glance, the sense of compositional and decorative harmony with the surroundings is broken: the figure of Carolina Amoretti wrapped in the cloth, almost clambering into its folds, calls to mind Pistoletto's Venere degli stracci, and immediately signals a contemporary intervention that generates friction between codes and languages, between the emergence and apparition of works from different historical periods within the same space.

From these visual premises, a choreography of quiet, sinuous lightness unfolds, accompanied by music and ambient sound with occasional electronic inflections, diffused from amplifiers placed in the rooms' blind spots. The gestures and movements of the three performers proceed, consistently unhurried and composed, as though governed by an algorithmic logic: sequences appear to repeat, yet with each cycle new passages and small variations are introduced, gradually reshaping the overall design and introducing a minimal narrative tension into what remains a work conceived in circular form, traversable and decomposable at the audience's discretion.

Adding further dynamism to these small choreographic tableaux are the constant — if slow — displacements of the dancing trio along two axes: individually, from top to bottom, in a kind of physical "struggle" each engages with the fabrics, almost swimming through them, curling into their folds or breaking free with vertical ascents; collectively, from one point to another across the horizontal spaces, withdrawing on soft-footed steps and exchanging places between rooms, in an alternation that — recalled in hindsight, once one has left the slightly rarefied perceptual dimension and stretched temporality into which Fuori quadro draws its audience — one is tempted to call vertiginous, and which grows increasingly insistent as the performance develops.

Yet these sensations arise perhaps less from the choreographic intention itself than from the relationship it establishes with the context, and from the position we as spectators find ourselves occupying within this "symbolic exchange" — a dialogue that takes shape and expands in a dimension not easily grasped, one that operates neither through imitation or symbiosis nor through sharp contrasts.

Our gaze is met by countless stimuli: at one moment we feel drawn to trace the resonances between the performance and the altarpieces — resonances that are clearly not only chromatic, as they may have seemed at first glance, but also iconographic, in a mutual correspondence of cadences; at another we find ourselves focusing on a single dancer, following their wandering through the spaces only to detach, in a movement of unguarded surprise, when their silhouette crosses that of another; or else exploring the pinacoteca's rooms in search of those vantage points from which, within a narrow but compelling field of vision, it becomes possible to take in portions of both rooms at once — in the illusion of grasping an overall picture that proves sustainable only for brief moments, one that ultimately conceals more than it reveals and corresponds almost to peering through a keyhole.

In this sense, and after having tried "various solutions", one begins to understand the quality of movement gruppo nanou pursues in Fuori quadro. The dancers appear guided by a choreographic intention rather than by a fixed design or underlying structure: or, more precisely, the design becomes visible as the outcome of the internal coherence of those intentions, as they unfold across the arc of the performance — which does tend toward narrative, but only insofar as it enters into relation with the context and with the works that context holds.

Gestures, bodies and the "scenic rags" that at a certain point seem to take on a life of their own perform the function of continuously remodulating our attention, which is captured only to be redirected toward the walls, the altarpieces, the architecture, and back again toward the interior of the scene — in a circular process of mutual response and counter-response. As is often the case, the "right angle" does not exist — except as an incessant process of refraction of the gaze, which Fuori quadro paradoxically manages to place at the centre of our line of sight with blurred precision.