The delicacy of approaching does not belong to the eyes.
Like disoriented lovers, we wander
with gentle pretenses and radical intuitions,
celebrating the salvation of feeling ahead of time.

We are erotic clairvoyance.

Antidote to dark times, we whisper an unbreakable wish:
to smile toward one another,
to recognize ourselves through each other

and if a desire emerges…surrender?
(our force: to feel)
.
.
.
Placebo Dances is an immersive performance unfolding in intimate proximity between audience and performers.
A space for the reconfiguration of relations, it moves as a lysergic drift — an inclination, a collective unbalancing toward openness, bliss, connection, and enchantment. A sensorial condition in which pleasure can emerge between selves and others, while unsettling the ways our bodies are positioned in the world.
In Placebo Dances, we search for desire-shaken postures: bodily states that softly disorganize perception, destabilize form, and allow the body to waver toward an erotic closeness of being.
Pleasure as a salvation in times of catastrophe.

About artist

Flavia Zaganelli (she/her) is a dance artist working across choreography and performance through an interdisciplinary and collaborative practice. Her research centers on the body as a site of somatic perception, relational knowledge, and processes of transformation.
Her work investigates how embodied experience can reconfigure modes of sensing, relating, and imagining collective realities. Moving between choreography, performative situations, and shared practices, she develops process-based work that foregrounds presence, affect, and interdependence.
Her works (The Game We Play, INVISIBILIA, electrica/ecosi’stɛma/) have been presented in theatres and festivals across Italy and Europe. Her most recent research, Placebo Dances, explores pleasure as a political and sensorial field, proposing an erotic reconfiguration of how we inhabit the world. It premiered at Santarcangelo Festival 2025.

Credits

Idea: Flavia Zaganelli
Performance and Research: María Durbá, Lucrezia Rosellini, Flavia Zaganelli
Sound: Krzysztof Bagiński
Lights: Fabrizio Piro
Production: Associazione L’Altra and Flavia Zaganelli
Mentoring: Silvia Bottiroli, Maria F. Scaroni
Promotion in dialogue with Irene Rossini
Local Producer: Elza Strazdiņa 

Supported by Boarding Pass Plus Dance 2023 in collaboration with Santarcangelo Festival, Moving in November Festival, IIC Helsinki and Liisa Pentii+Co Studio. 

Sustained by Santarcangelo Festival, Lavanderia a Vapore, Alchemilla, Graner, IIC Barcelona, Dom Utopii, IIC Krakow – in the context of LANDING (Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale, Santarcangelo Festival, area Export ATER Fondazione), Fuoriprogramma Festival, Altes Finanzamt-Berlin.