Sul comune pedestre

Abstract

The presence of so-called “amateur” dancers has been growing in the European scene in the last few years. Behind the notion of “amateur” are, at once, a variety of individuals, of practices, and a kind of categorical confusion. This paper considers a very specific genre of “amateurs”: not the non-professional dancers, whose practice is constant and often moulded by a certain ideal of virtuosity of the dancer, but rather those who are defined as “pedestrian”, according to the term borrowed from the American postmodern dance. These are the dancers appearing in the professional scene thanks to calls for participation, local recruitments, and embodying the fiction of a naïf dancer, untouched by any training, practice, virtuosity, and thus splendid, since escaping the dominant choreographic norms. It is also about nuancing the myth of the naïf dancer, by pinpointing alternatives forms of training, such as improvisation, the somatic practices, and instant composition; in the end, the “pedestrian” category does not seems to be outer or opposite to the one of the professional dancer, but intrinsically tied to it and even as a fiction produced by the professional dance world.