TheatrumOpera: space becomes action. Plastic tracks of dancing research

In the experience of epigenetic research that finds a home in the ‘embodied education’ group, Art and its sense-motion sphere constitute the environment in which the pedagogical takes shape – where pedagogical refers to the nature of the transformative processes of the ‘living’ (Dewey, 1934). Art is mobile space: it is dance that creates (Ceruti, 1989) for the ‘living’ and its generative and situated autopoietic process (Maturana-Varela, 1980) from which knowledge and cognition emerge in the form of action/gesture and work (Arendt, 1956). In this perspective, space becomes an essential category of an epistemological and methodological work that identifies the tactile and ‘plastic’ quality of space as a co-essential condition for it to fully accommodate the sense-related life of the living (Coccia, 2011). Architecture and Pedagogy thus look to the same constructs – the body that becomes space and the space that becomes body – recognising the centrality of the performative and communicative/relational dimension that runs through them and nourishes their mutual co-existential necessity. Reclaiming the phenomenological perspective and, in particular, Nancy’s (2010) notion of theatre-body and Berthoz’s (1997) motion theory of perception. We present some aspects of a work related to the design/production of a hypothesis of a Formantspace called TheatrumOpera. The study refers to two groups – high-school students and kindergarten teachers – involved in a process experiencing embodied methodology as a performative practice from which to design intercode spaces (Carpenzano-D’Ambrosio-Latour, 2016) for education. The difficulty of reopening constructs embedded by a particular Architecture and a specific Pedagogy calls into play the Theatremachine, and therefore the performative of Art, as a deconstructing device that can open up to a different stance, a different experience, a different poietics. The two working groups and their ‘works’ or traces of the path they have followed are presented and drawn into a piece of research that reclaims the necessity of performative practices and the richness of their intercodal plurality, making them part of a discourse that brings Architecture and Pedagogy back onto the shared trajectory of research on transFormative processes of a cognitive/embodied nature. This trajectory reinterprets body and space outside the category of language and expression as it needs to reclaim the political horizon of body and space from whose mutual generativity the life of a new community form in movement emerges.