Dance To Live, Dialogue between Italy and Egypt
DANCE TO LIVE EGYPT is not just a training program presented in any country.
Egypt is not just "any country" for us.
Egypt is the Mother of the greatest civilizations.
The meaning of glimpsing a future is to harvest what had already been sown in the past and obtain a precious distillate of space and time.
The wisdom of the Egyptians teaches us to rediscover the magical meaning of life, to celebrate every moment as a sacred rite, relying on the forces of instinct present in all of us.
These same things are at the basis of the "urgency" of our work, born from the "shortcomings", from the "voids of meaning" that now pervade the hyperrationalistic European culture.< /p>
If we could move the hands of the clock back a few millennia, we would realize how complex it would be to understand a world which, under sometimes familiar and common aspects, hides profound differences with the our. There is a great fracture between the ancient Egyptians and us and it is not just a chronological gap: from generation to generation, we have lost the codes, the access keys to enter the pharaonic world without risking formulating conceptions dictated by our way of seeing reality.
The woman and man of today find themselves, when confronted with that distant world, faced with a civilization made up of a set of symbols and monuments as fascinating as they are enigmatic.< /p>
In some respects Egypt, despite being very ancient, can appear truly current to our eyes.
Just think that a woman, unlike what happened among the Greeks and Romans, possessed a legal personality that allowed her to divorce her spouse or make a will. Or the importance of civil rights, which on some occasions led to the organization of strikes against injustices suffered in the workplace.
The life of the ancient Egyptians was characterized by a strong spirituality and rituality in which everything moved according to the will of Maat, the cosmic order thanks to which Egypt he lived in peace, an order guaranteed on earth by the pharaoh and the administrative structure that headed him.
The Egyptian person was, therefore, an integral part of this divine universal balance, on which his relationships with the unshakable state apparatus, the most complex and articulated of antiquity, were based . These were relationships based on a dutiful rigor, which a very long tradition had shaped and colored in a thousand shades, expressed by wise admonitions, moral teachings and rules of life, handed down for centuries in literary works that still have a great appeal today.
We talk about the first civilization, the Egyptian one, which invented Writing, Medicine, Surgery, Chemistry, crossing architecture, astronomy, physics, laying the foundations for the development of much of human knowledge.
Modern man seems to have left all this behind, choosing the path of rationality and the removal of many aspects of our being.
Modern Egypt is a large, strong country, one of the major powers in Africa, so much so that it is proposed by the West as a mediator of growing Middle Eastern tensions.
Definitely a country with strong contradictions, light years away from that wisdom full of subtle presences so listened to in antiquity.
Yet, in the souls of the Egyptian people we work with, something passes more fluidly when we talk about emotions, feelings, aspirations, compared to what happens when we work with Europeans.
As if these people had decided, ideally and practically, to believe more in what comes from within, compared to the act exhibited externally.
Even dance for them, as for me, seems to have more to do with "being" than "doing". It's a question of density, of quality, much less of "objectively measurable quantity".
Unlike us, over there Dance is still an art, not (or not only) a science; thanks to their history, there is still a lot of trust in Art, or simply in the creative, spontaneous, cathartic gesture.
Perhaps this is why our trainings in Egypt are an opportunity for constant mutual growth: Dance Therapy is such because it starts from the world of those we meet.
Dance To Live Egypt in this autumn 2023 gave life to its FOURTH EDITION and for the first time the Program was carried out both in the BASIC LEVEL with several new people who joined , and in the PROFESSIONAL LEVEL, with more in-depth contents at both a theoretical and practical level, punctuated by written, oral and practical tests and exams.
Once again we worked on Maria Fux's Dance Therapy and on various complementary techniques and disciplines, such as Ritual Dances, Dance Theatre, Contact Improvisation, providing the students multiple perspectives of experience, reflection, intervention and methods of facilitating the enjoyment of dance.
In a dark period for the fate of humanity, in a country struck by a devastating collective pain for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, struck by a monstrous financial devaluation, in the absence of confrontations with a West that has become so hostile, DTL humbly contributed to creating an opportunity for discussion, knowledge, sharing and empowerment for those who participated in the activities.
During the days of the Programme, performative and choreographic proposals were welcomed and hosted (Salvatore Cataldo with Dear Children), choreographic and visual ideas were worked on (with Dalia El Abd and Heba Korashi), we immersed ourselves in human nature, as in that of the planet, we embraced people, trees, worlds.
And we will continue to do so: from January a TRAINING COURSE will begin in LIVORNO and it will be possible to participate in LIVE ONLINE Italy – Egypt on the theory and practice of DTL ® METHOD.
Welcome to those who want to join our colorful family!
Source: “Ancient Egypt, the way of wisdom” by J. Procaccio (Ed. Riza)