Audience Reviews

AUDIENCE REVIEW: Rhizome

Company:
Cecilia Fontanesi & Elena Vannoni

Performance Date:
November 22, 2025

Freeform Review:

Rhizome unfolds as a powerful, immersive journey in three movements, guiding the audience from witnessing to participation, from separation to interconnection. Conceived by Cecilia Fontanesi in collaboration with director Elena Vannoni, the work feels both intimate and archetypal.

The performance opens with Fontanesi dancing at the center of a circle of chairs, her head marked by an intertwined, root-like wig. Moving with clarity and quiet intensity, she becomes a living root, offering each audience member a small red light—a fragile yet potent gesture that feels like the transmission of life itself. This opening establishes a sense of care and responsibility, gently awakening the audience’s role within the work.

The second part leads spectators through an installation composed of multiple stations, where sound, text, and images invite reflection on underground networks, symbiosis, and shared intelligence. Under Vannoni’s direction, the project takes the form of a guided path composed of experiential “stations." Guided and attentive, the audience moves through the space not as passive observers but as participants within a living system. 

In the final section, Fontanesi dances in a dim room filled with hanging strings, the root-wig suspended above like a memory or origin. Her movement traces a journey from unknowing to discovery, from resistance to surrender, until her body becomes fully entangled within the web. In the closing moment, the audience is invited to hold the strings as well, dissolving the boundary between performer and spectators. Together, all bodies become part of the same underworld of roots—intertwined, responsive, and alive.

Rhizome leaves a lasting impression: a poetic embodiment of interdependence that is felt not only intellectually, but viscerally, in the body and in relation to others.

Photo Credit:
Photo by Chiara Izzi