Ginevra Panzetti & Enrico Ticconi: Dangerous Beauty of Flags

At the artists’ talks after the show, you mentioned several times the word persuasion known from ancient rhetoric where it is about talking. What is the persuasive power of body and movement?

Enrico: Talking about ancient rhetoric, indeed, in one of our previous works, we explored quite deeply persuasive tools from the perspective of Quintilian’s rhetorical treatises. There’s a section about “actio” – the relationship between speech and gesture, how body movement serves to make speech more persuasive. We were interested in deepening what tools you can use – bodily tools – to support verbal language. Repetition for example plays a big role in how persuasive someone or something can be. And it is a motion element that has a strong presence in the choreographic aspect of our work as well.

Ginevra: When it comes to how we compose what the body will inhabit in choreography, repetition is really central. We also experience this in the media, like in advertisements – we start to feel desire for the object being shown after a certain number of repetitions. It’s also a tool for hypnosis, where the basic technique is built on repetition. It’s about how forms, messages, and content can shift through repetition – how they can become blurred or transformed by it.

Enrico: Just to add another element from dance history – synchronicity is also a tool we use, reminding us of military language. If you think about how ballet was born, historically there’s a clear link to the military body. It’s said ballet began in the court of Louis XIV, and that choreographic language came from the military language of that time.

It recalls Aristotle’s pathos – emotions. Waving veils, flying flags, curves like in the Baroque castles where we are – there is pathos and seductive expressivity. There’s something very sensually feminine about flags. Did you also explore these gender-erotic qualities of the flag?

Ginevra: We didn’t navigate into that territory. Although we’re very much aware that my body represents a female body and Enrico’s body represents a male body, it’s not something we investigated in our choreography. We think of the two of us as humans. Gender was not thematised.

Enrico: Discussing this realm of gender – in AeReA we actually explored how to embody an authoritarian body – traditionally linked to masculinity, like military parades, expressions of power in the body, in gestures – and then how to transition into movements and qualities recalling the opposite: collapse, fragility, arriving at the zero point of motion, represented in the performance by the image of a shroud covering a dead body.

You cooperated with the flag waving group from Arezzo. What kind of new technique did you learn? Did they also expand your understanding of flags in their historical context?

Ginevra: The group in Arezzo is close to very old flag waving based on Medieval traditions – compared to other groups in Italy that focus more on virtuosic movements. Flag waving comes from a military alphabet used to communicate over far distances. With time it became something folkloric. We learned how the flag is made, but especially their severe way of being connected with the flag, including the weight of the stick – which is terrible. What we do is really basic compared to what they can do. The rest of our approach was to deconstruct what we learned and find our own relation in terms of movement and kinetics with the object.

Was the deconstruction of the persuasive ideological power of the flag your intention?

Enrico: I don’t know if we really worked towards deconstructing the persuasive power – actually the opposite. We delved into the persuasive quality the flag has and its very strong choreographic potential. That’s why we immediately decided to learn more about the movement vocabulary of this folkloric practice. And as Ginevra said, we wanted to develop further the relationship between the traditional flag waving practice and the body. In folklore, they use it in a very straightforward way, and we wanted to explore, let’s say, all the plastic and dynamic potential of the flag and how the object can transform the body.

Ginevra: But I’m curious why you said deconstruction. Did you read it as deconstructing, instead of building up a structure to be persuasive?

Hm, imagine you perform this piece for a very sophisticated fascist elite. How would they read it? Maybe they would still see it as a demonstration of the beauty of fascism, not deconstruction. So I was wondering – was your intention to deconstruct it? Did you use any specific strategies for that? A friend of mine said his feeling was negative – maybe he actually felt that heavy tension of bodily affect.

Ginevra: We wanted to put this aesthetic into crisis. The choreography is also a kind of death machine – dead bodies rising up and returning to death through repetition, covered by the flag like a shroud. We’re interested in that tension: being drawn to something that provokes fear. Discomfort is welcome, because it creates reflection. The piece uses the alphabet of military parades – synchronicity, precision, flattened personalities – to tease the audience through perfection.

The piece is from 2019. Back then, people also saw revolution and freedom in it. Both readings were always present. I had the impression audiences were freer to move between different codes – the dead body, the fascist body, the body of revolt. Now everything gets linked to the fascist body. That shift says something about the current moment.

The point is who’s waving the flag – you at KoresponDance, or someone at a right-wing rally. That’s the ethos in Aristotle’s rhetoric: the character of the one who is speaking, who is trying to persuade. You mentioned some venues refused to present the work because of these connotations. Did that really happen?

Enrico: Yes. Some people preferred not to program it, because they felt it might be risky – that the audience could fall into certain effects of persuasion without reading it critically. The piece works strongly with tools of persuasion.

Ginevra: Yeah, I think there’s a fear of showing something without a clear, easily readable message. For me, that’s a kind of soft censorship – and it’s dangerous. I often think of A Clockwork Orange by Kubrick. It’s an amazing representation of violence, but at the time some people were even attracted to the violent figures. Still, can you imagine not showing that film? Of course, I’m not comparing the artistic quality, but the point is: should we stop representing what’s dangerous just because we’re afraid people won’t find the key to reading it? It’s important to take that risk – and to create discussion.

Did you adjust the work somehow? Do you reflect on the changing reception?

Ginevra: No, we didn’t change anything. But I feel more and more the urgency to have a talk with the audience after the piece like we had here. Though some people are still afraid to program it, at the same time, there’s also a stronger intention from others to present it. Both tendencies are rising: some fear the piece, others support it precisely because of the crisis and topics it brings.

Do you feel that flags are so persuasive that it can even be somewhat dangerous to you? Waving the flags for thirty minutes, how does it change you? The bodily affect can be sticky.

Ginevra: I wouldn’t say it persuades us, but we’re aware of its power. In our workshops, we always stress that what we do is a representation. It’s essential to stay detached – to repeat even violent gestures without being emotionally affected. That’s part of our training. Our work often deals with violence. There was a time we watched many videos of violent acts – it was horrible – but it helped us understand how to repeat those gestures without doubling the role of the victim. We trained ourselves not to be there psychologically.

So you use real violence as part of your research?

Enrico: The representation of violence has always been at the core of our work – how it’s experienced through media, how it’s reproduced. Most of the time, though, we work from already filtered images – like Goya’s Disasters of War. It’s a second layer: someone already represented the violence, and we work from that. That’s our usual way of approaching violent imagery.

We’re now developing a new piece for 2027 titled Hell is Empty. It focuses on cruelty and how it’s historically linked to beauty. There’s a need, especially now, to go deeper into how cruelty is aestheticised, how beauty has been used to seduce, and where those two blur.

Oh, I remember! Dante! Lasciate ogni speranza voi che entrate? If hell is empty now there is hope to return from it.

Ginevra: Actually, the title comes from The Tempest by Shakespeare: “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” We only used the first part – “hell is empty” – because at first it sounds like a hopeful message. But during the piece, the full sentence will emerge. And then the question becomes: if the devils are here – who are they?

Hopefully, those who do not know how to wave flags very well. Thank you.

Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi, based in Berlin and Torino, have been working as a duo since 2008. Their artistic research interlaces dance, performance and visual art. Deepening themes related to the historical union between communication, violence and power, they draw on ancient imaginaries, creating hybrid figures or images between history and contemporaneity. Their work has received numerous international awards and has been presented at the most prestigious European festivals as well as in Japan, Brazil, Lebanon, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. Since 2020, their choreographic duo practice, in which they often perform their own compositions, has been enriched by creation work for other prestigious international companies such as Studio Contemporary Dance Company (HR), T.H.E Dance Company (SG), Dance On Ensemble (DE), MM Contemporary Dance Company (IT). One of their latest choreographic works, INSEL, premiered in 2023 at the Tanz Im August Festival in Berlin, while this year they are premiering a new creation for the German state company Dance Theater Heidelberg (DE).

AeReA (2019)
Authors and performers: Ginevra Panzetti, Enrico Ticconi
Sound: Demetrio Castellucci
Light: Annegret Schalke
‚Costumes: Ginevra Panzetti, Enrico Ticconi
Flag waving coach: Carlo Lobina
Flag-wavers: Association of Arezzo
Technical care: Paolo Tizianel
Touring, promotion: Aurélie Martin
Production management: VAN
Video documentation: Ettore Spezza
Realised through the support of: Premio Hermès Danza Triennale Milano 

Performance: 12 July 2025 at the KoresponDance Festival in Žďár nad Sázavou, Dům kultury