Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

Time Does Not Exist – this is what Sir Wayne McGregor, reflecting on time, chose to name this edition of the International Festival of Contemporary Dance, which this year cele­brates its very special 20th anniversary.
Inspired by the theories of physicist Carlo Rovelli, McGregor invites us to question our conception of time. Rather than linear and uniform, modern physics describes it as emerg­ing through relationships between events. Hence dance, which exists in time, becomes a privileged place to explore this complexity. In the body of dance, time bends, flows and stops, and each choreographic gesture carries with it traces of those that came before it, from every era, as if movement were preserved by a memory older than consciousness itself.
McGregor’s reflections for the Biennale Dan­za 2026 explore these themes, intertwining science, philosophy and perception – begin­ning from the premise that past and present coexist in a body that remembers as it moves. The possibility of multiple states existing si­multaneously, a suggestion drawn directly from Rovelli, thus finds an extraordinary per­ceptual analogue in the arts of movement. Every performance contains many different temporalities: the technical one of the execu­tion, the emotional one of the spectator, the remembered one of the archive, the imaginary one of storytelling. Nothing happens only once, and every gesture is simultaneously presence and residue, as evoked in the beauti­ful poster for this Festival, inspired by Ead­weard Muybridge’s photographic sequence of a running horse – a simultaneity of times in space, with space thus becoming time cap­tured on film.
Through the movement of bodies, choreo­graphic works probe the memory of Biennale Danza, drawing on the fundamental contribu­tion of the Historical Archive to transform the choreographic gesture into a space where time can bend and reinvent itself. The Historical Ar­chive is video, paper and photographic docu­mentation – but also, and above all, it is a living organism, carried within the bodies that have crossed stage time. Each dancer brings with them fragments of other bodies, other tech­niques, other visions – and each gesture con­tains invisible genealogies. McGregor de­scribes this process as a continuous layering of intelligences, images and embodied experienc­es that overlap “out of time and out of sync with everything that surrounds them”.
Dance, then, becomes a form of relational knowledge; a transmission system in which every movement leaves its mark. And, in an era in which political and digital systems con­tinually disrupt this recognition with an unin­terrupted flow of images, the choreographic body also appears profoundly political.
“The first territory each of us inhabits is the body”, McGregor said in his talk at the May 2026 conference Dissent and Peace. Before maps, nations and ideologies, therefore, comes the fragile geography of the human body: the original site of both sovereignty and violation.
And so, no gesture is isolated, no gesture is alone. For it is precisely dance that brings thinking back into the body’s sensitive mat­ter, rebuilding attention and allowing us to perceive time as an embodied experience. No action truly ends at the moment it is performed. We are all part of the same collective organism – participants in a choreography that never stands still.