How much space does a person take, and how much do they give back? The question sounds abstract until you put it in a square. Blowing your nose loudly in public is acceptable, up to a point. Where the point falls, nobody has decided in advance. It moves with the hour, with the number of people watching, with whether anyone else is doing it too.
A group of people worked for four hours with live composition, embodied awareness and score-making, and then took what they had built into a public square in Florence.
The arguments people use for occupying space are simpler than they look. I was here first. There are more of us. These claims are thin, and they organise how we sit, how we move, where we stop to rest — the same logic that draws territories and borders.
The workshop worked on the claim that is not made outright: whether presence can be negotiated rather than asserted, and whether that negotiation can hold what is usually left out of it — being too loud, too visible, too many.
In the square
As night fell, the piazza del Carmine was almost empty. Each person had chosen a daily activity: reading, taking photos, writing, jumping, or simply sitting still. One person lay down on the stone and sang. Two others crouched facing each other over a small piece of paper. Another blew soap bubbles. Passersby asked us what we were doing. We answered, and some stopped to listen and chat, and after a while they went on their way.
The facilitators
Barabás Szigeti is a performer, director and theatre researcher. He works on the fragility of representation, building a stage language that makes the formation of an image visible while it is happening, before it settles into meaning. He is the author of I:AM Momo and co-founder of the research group nothing_happens. In his work, light, sound and dramaturgical composition are handled live, and the timing of a scene belongs to the performers or to no one — structures that allow response to a situation rather than execution of a role.
Kadence Luella Neill is a choreographer, performer and writer. Her practice sits between dance, theatre, mysticism and collective composition, treating choreography as a devotional and philosophical mode. Born in New York and living between Helsinki and New York, she completed an MA in Choreography at the University of the Arts Helsinki and was for years a member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma. In 2024 she was a DanceWEB scholar at ImPulsTanz. She holds not-knowing as part of any creative process, working with grief, thresholds, and what cannot be fully known.
What remains
A square works because people keep adjusting to each other without discussing it. Halfway through the workshop, one person left. What no adjustment reaches is whoever has already gone, or never came.
