Thesis title: Per un museo sensibile. La danza nella mediazione museale: storia, pratiche e ricerche sul campo tra Parigi e Roma
Within what critics now define as the “performative turn” of the museum, which over the past fifteen years in particular has contributed to the experimentation of new modes of conserving, transmitting and experiencing cultural heritage, this thesis investigates the role of dance in museum mediation as a practice capable of rethinking the identity and the social and educational role of the institution, orienting it towards the notion of a “sensitive museum”. The research brings together dance history, museology and cultural mediation, with particular attention to recent reflections on “médiation sensible”, explored in depth during the research period in Paris.
After a first historical part retracing genealogies of the presence of dance in exhibition spaces, from early forms of permeability between spectacle and display to the more recent institutionalisation of performative practices and their hybridisation with contemporary curatorial practices, the thesis focuses on the more specific field of mediation. This is understood as a privileged standpoint from which to examine the relationship between culture, institution and community through the prism of dance. With particular attention to the Francophone context, the research analyses the hybridisations emerging from the encounter between cultural mediation and choreographic practices, the development of “spectacular”, artistic and sensitive forms of mediation, and the most recent definition of “médiation sensible” proposed by the ICOM Special Interest Group. By placing the idea of the “thinking body” at the centre of the museum aesthetic experience, these reflections offer a theoretical and methodological field of comparison that makes it possible to construct a shared vocabulary between sensitive mediation and dance, contributing to the elaboration and legitimisation of specific forms of sensitive and choreographic mediation within institutions.
The third part examines these issues through field research conducted at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, considered as the main case study because of its history of relations with dance and the programming of its Service Culturel. The comparison with Rome finally leads to the analysis of several significant experiences in the local context and to the presentation of two initial laboratory experiments carried out at the Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea (MLAC) at Sapienza University of Rome and at the Galleria Borghese, opening up possible avenues for practice-based research into sensitive mediation through dance in Rome’s museums.