Laboratory Practice

the laboratory is freedom and the desire to know. knowledge can only happen through trust.

Since 2004 I have worked in theatrical, movement and image pedagogy. My research focuses on the body as knower, inventor and guide.

I work with children, young people, adults and the elderly — often during their first expressive experience — accompanying them in building a bodily "personal grammar": an alphabet of movement that each person discovers and shares through individual exploration and group work. At the heart of this practice is the idea that every activity — recreational, expressive or educational — must start from an inner movement, from something that arises within.

The laboratory unfolds in two phases. In the exploration phase, the body engages with space, time, rhythm and interaction, and learns to see itself "from another point of view". Other resources are then activated: voice, writing, painting, plastic composition, music. In the construction phase, participants become experimenters and makers: starting from texts, photographs, novels, poems, sounds, artworks and songs, each person creates their own material to share — a small performance, an exhibition, an exercise.

A significant milestone in this journey was the creation of the project Teatro Relazionale, together with Valerio Malorni and Annalisa Rauso. Between 2011 and 2013 we gave life to laboratories and performances — including Io e Io e Te, Don Giovanni, La Fine del Mondo, Aperto Mare and Senti, Tu!.

In this experience the theatre was lived as a place of relationship, of research and of discovery of one's own expressiveness.

For me, the laboratory remains the place of research par excellence: where one meets others, and where creativity and trust are practised.

Stage Presence

This practice gave rise to a research path on the stage presence of the teacher (Insegnanti: 12 ore in sala teatro. La presenza scenica nel lavoro dell'insegnante di scuola primaria. Una proposta operativa — see Academic Research).

The teacher is on stage every day in front of the class, and bodily, vocal and relational expressiveness is as much part of their craft as the content they convey. Teachers are called to embody what they speak about, and to pass on something of themselves, of their enthusiasm, in the relationship with children and young people.

The programme offers expressive explorations and activities for the construction of teachers' own materials.

Expressive Mathematics©

Since 2013 I have been developing a pedagogical research project on the teaching of mathematics through dance, music, the visual arts and storytelling: expressive mathematics©.

At its heart lies aesthetic experience as a way of accessing mathematical concepts.

Expressive mathematics© aims to bring alongside the initiation into quantitative symbolism and scientific thought the expression of self, imagination and curiosity, following the vision of a mathematics for the flourishing of the human being.

The arts have an ancestral bond with mathematics: in poetry, in architecture, in dance, in music, in painting, beauty emerges through rules of composition, symmetry, proportion.

At the centre lies the dancing body: bodily experience, mimesis, embodiment. This alliance is strengthened by other arts, in particular children's literature and drawing.

The research is addressed to children and to mathematics teachers, and takes shape in workshops, teacher training and publications.

SPETTACOLO "SENTI, TU!" LAB. TEATRO RELAZIONALE GIUGNO 2013

LABORATORIO PER LA FORMAZIONE DEI DOCENTI IC "DON ANDREA SANTORO" PRIVERNO, GIUGNO 2017

LABORATORIO DI "GEOMETRIA IN MOVIMENTO" IC VIA CUTIGLIANO, ROMA GENNAIO 2017