balere

My grandparents were ballroom dancers. For them, going dancing was a precious and unmissable ritual, every Saturday and Sunday evening. The festive clothes, the enjoyment, a kind of complicity between the couple and the performing orchestra. They would sometimes bring me as well to these dancehalls and I would stay on the edge of the dance floor watching them swirl to the relentless pace of the music that seemed to get faster and faster. Then, a long time after that I ended up in a dancehall by chance one evening: everything had changed, I found myself in an architectural space that had evolved and it was nothing like my memory of it. I was fascinated by the new aesthetic visual and the curiosity to go and see other dancehalls and their transformations launched a search from which the Dancehall project was born. My memory was of simple and essential containers; subsequently there was a new way to interpret entertainment for the masses and the economic and business aspects of this transformed these places. At the end of the 80’s dancehalls were reinterpreted by recuperating traditional elements through a post-modern process and a rather presumptuous idea of the ephemeral tied to enjoyment. A new architectural setting achieved some complex dynamics: the big, central room converges onto the dance floor, almost creating a reciprocal dependence between the artist’s exhibition and the spectators, who have an immediate visual that also converges towards the center, from any angle around the dance floor, the entertainment. What’s more, I found structures created for diverse entertainment needs and lighting that could indulge a variety of situations, from the most festive to the coziest and most discreet. All of the relationships between the space and a new idea for entertainment, linked for eternity to a popular tradition that delivered illusory scenes and projections mostly to the provinces and small towns. These won’t delay the arrival of the end of the line for a new reinterpretation. That’s it; with ‘Dancehalls’ I also wanted to portray the last acts of this performance.