The Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria proves once again, in this second weekend, to be one of the festival's most vital spaces for artistic reflection — a magnificent museum, home to extraordinary works of art, and a place where contemporary dance enters into dialogue with the historical and artistic heritage in a relationship of genuine resignification, as was the case last year with Nicola Galli's intervention and this year with Fuori quadro project by gruppo nanou. The Ravenna-based collective, long committed to a research practice exploring the boundary between body, image and space, presents a performative device conceived specifically for picture galleries — and in particular for a dialogue of colours and gestures with the art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The dancers' bodies, guided by the choreographies of Marco Valerio Amico and Rhuena Bracci, inhabit the exhibition space in search of a point of entry into the paintings, interweaving the meditation of stillness with minimal gestures and sounds in the presence of extraordinary works, with the intent of prolonging their tensions, their light, their colour and their folds — "an unstable extension of images". In a play of slippages between figure and ground, between canvas and room, the audience — metaphorically enveloped by golden and Prussian blue fabrics, wine-red carpets across which the three performers move with slowness and measured gesture — is invited to cross a series of thresholds, where iconographic memory blurs into the immediate perception of the moving body, turning the frame into a sensitive field to be traversed.