CREATIVE, LOCAL, DANCE! _ 2024

Creative, Local, Dance! was a project involving the creation of itinerant contemporary dance performances at the Historic Venues of Udine and Venzone, performances that culminated in the AreaDanza_urban dance festival.

From the meeting and exchange around the practices and histories of each historic venue that took part in the project, urban performances emerged featuring the Company’s professional dancers. The synergy between dance and craftsmanship was a source of inspiration for the artists, a form of communicative innovation for the artisans, and an unconventional tourism opportunity for the municipalities involved.

OBJECTIVES

  1. Creative, Local, Dance! aimed to raise public awareness of, and bring audiences closer to, the performing arts as a way of narrating urban and civic places, along with the historical and productive richness of local businesses. How to tell the story of a long-standing, artisanal profession became the beating heart of our project.
  2. Creative, Local, Dance! set out to celebrate the city center’s spaces from a cultural and artistic perspective. For several years, AreaDanza_urban dance festival explored the theme of the “Borghi più belli d’Italia” (Italy’s Most Beautiful Villages) in Friuli Venezia Giulia. Starting with this edition, the Historic Venues of our two wonderful territories (Udine and Venzone) became a source of artistic inspiration for telling their story with creativity!
  3. Creative, Local, Dance! succeeded in celebrating the artisanal character of the product and connecting it with the art of dance. In this specific case, taking action meant reaching out toward the other, building a bridge, with the aim of sharing practices and histories that belong to our city’s heritage.

The performances, born from encounters with local producers, gave businesses a new way to tell the story of their work, through a bilingual video (Italian and English) that — drawing on interviews with the business owners and documentation of the research and cross-pollination process involved — brought out the distinctive excellence of their craft through an artistic lens. The video was made available to the Historic Venues as personal material, to support national and international tourism promotion and to renew the value of their commercial identity, embedded as it is in the history of the city or town in which each business is located.