“A good preliminary practice, before any other, is the practice of wonder. The practice of not knowing and wondering. Looking around and forgetting the concepts of tree, street, house, sea,and watching with eyes that ignore what they already know. The practice of wonder heals a sick heart which has only practised fear”.
(from Questo immenso non sapere by Chandra Candiani)
What do we want Danae Festival to be like? We want it to be a place where the unthought-of can happen, a house offering the right conditions for projects still unnamed, and taking the risks they involve. We would like both our long-time and our new followers to dare with us. We would like us all to build this house, urged by our desire to meet each other, to explore new forms.
And “house” is the keyword that came to our mind as we started working on this edition of Danae, and for the first time we have crafted our Festival around a theme. When energies and directions are put in motion, then surprising coincidences occur: we received many proposals that seemed to ponder explicitly or subtly on the issue of house and, in a wider sense, of dwelling.
In these last few years the house has become the background of all our social interactions, which has aroused contradictory feelings. The relationship with its spaces, which have long been the only place where to be, has definitely changed. Many people have brought about more or less radical changes in their way of living by changing house or housing habits, by setting up community projects.
The house has always meant much more than the actual building, it is more a home than a physical place. It is where we feel safe, but also the space that limits and locks us up. And then comes the body, our first house, our first clothing, which had to found strategies and ways of expressing itself despite prohibitions and distances.
This year’s Festival is the result of a number of questions and doubts about the present time, the possibility of breaking the strict boundaries between audience and stage to let an encounter occur,perhaps in the spaces preceding and following the creation and the performance. Danae intends to voice the thought, shifting from the artistic dimension to its inevitable political content.
So what to expect? As usual we try not to linger in known territories, we need to open up to possibilities. To wreck conventions, customs, hegemonic practices.
We will travel through both actual and metaphoric houses, we will watch, listen, participate, there will be questions on how to be on both sides of the stage, on how to be in the world.