The E’BAL network: an introduction

What is the E’BAL network, who are its members, and what is its mission?

Gaia Clotilde Chernetich

E’BAL is an informal collaborative initiative aimed at fostering the development and promotion of contemporary dance in Emilia-Romagna and the Republic of San Marino. Founded by Ater Fondazione in 2018, it now brings together 15 partners and various stakeholders, including dance artists, institutions, educators and industry professionals, to work towards shared goals and common visions. Among its main objectives is to maintain and develop a thriving regional dance scene. With its wide variety of audiences and the widespread presence of venues, E’BAL partners share the belief that contemporary dance requires tailored support, from the management of the creative process to the delivery on national and possibly international stages; and that programming should be accompanied by actions aimed at making dance more accessible, enjoyable as a participative social and artistic practice, and attractive for investors as well as for the region. The heterogeneous partners of E’BAL, not all of them representing dance-specific institutions, believe that their best practices can be shared within the network, not only for the sake of their collective missions, but also and above all for those new audiences whose access needs to be empowered using, among others, also unconventional strategies.

Antonio Volpone, managing and artistic director of Ater Fondazione, states that the goal in Emilia-Romagna is to create conditions for dance to encounter the smallest communities, where it might still feel new or less well known, whether because of limited exposure to contemporary arts in general or because of different cultural habits. When institutions have to deal with a lack of knowledge regarding contemporary dance, they have also to address the fact that this insists on the need to locally provide the right tools to empower access, in order to create further engagement and retention. Moreover, to value the differences within the region, strategic exchanges of practices and the use of public, unconventional spaces for dance become more than essential. If dance is to exit from exceptionality and become reachable by any kind of audience, the regional network has to work strategically and collectively.

E’BAL, which can be translated as “the dance” in the regional dialect, plays a significant role in strengthening the regional dance ecosystem as it responds to the need of uniting forces. The particularity of these forms of collaboration is that they are not exclusively or automatically based on economic exchanges. This allows a larger freedom within the partners’ agreements and helps the regional funding structure by empowering different kind of resources. According to Selina Bassini, founder of the association Cantieri Danza in Ravenna and curator of the Anticorpi Emilia Romagna network, as a network E’BAL connects companies, festivals, programmers and cultural institutions across the territory, and gives continuity to the mapping of ongoing projects, actors and dialogues.

It is interesting also to see how the collaboration between networks operates. By promoting collaboration, mobility and the sharing of resources among the dance community, exchanges help to increase the visibility of contemporary dance both nationally and internationally. Paolo Brancalion, coordinator of the residential activities at Teatro Dimora in Mondaino, affirms that through coordinated programming, artistic exchanges and support for emerging choreographers, the network contributes to making Emilia-Romagna an innovative platform for production in the performing arts. He also underlines the fact that E’BAL can be the tool through which the complexity of artistic and curatorial practices can be made clear and shared. He puts the accent on the accessibility of creative processes, and of the places where contemporary dance productions start coming to life.

E’BAL activities are guided by a manifesto that can be summarised in five main points:

the recognition of dance as a vital form of practice
the will to share and develop best practices within the field
the promotion of the local dance scene
the education and dissemination of dance knowledge
the development of the relationship between public spaces and new and existing spectators

Its members at the time of writing are:

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