In recent years, the CROSS Festival, which I direct and which takes place primarily on Lake Maggiore, has introduced the theme of the sacred into performative research. We have reimagined the nature of the sacred not as something given once and for all, but as a relational quality, embodied in practices and historically situated.
We have engaged with different spaces – including churches, abbeys, and temples – and I feel compelled to affirm that places become sacred through the experiences, memories, and relationships that gradually layer upon them over time.
In recent years, I have had the opportunity to witness artistic projects hosted in sacred spaces that deeply moved me. An example that has now entered the collective memory is Berlinde De Bruyckere — City of Refuge III, presented inside the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore (Venice Biennale 2024): her imposing archangel-like figures, wrapped in drapery and suspended between corporeality and absence, established a powerful dialogue with Tintoretto’s canvases and with the Palladian architecture of the sacred space, offering visitors an experience of suspension and contemplation.
Similarly, site-specific performative projects such as La Prima Danza – created by Bigi and Paoletti with the Fritz Company – chose Florentine cenacoli and sacred halls (including the cloister and the Cenacolo of Ognissanti) as spaces of representation: the presence of dance in settings so charged with sacred painting (above all Ghirlandaio’s Cenacolo) transforms the performance into a secular ritual that immediately calls for contemplation, accentuating the tension between the corporeality of movement and the devout stillness of ancient images.
From this perspective, the sacred space is intimately connected to the concept of place – which is never neutral, nor purely physical. For a space to become a place, it must be inhabited, recognized, narrated. It must gather stories, generate meanings, safeguard memories. It is this interweaving of space, memory, and identity that renders a place “sacred.” The sanctuary, the temple, the monastery are only some of the traditional manifestations of this relationship. But a house, a tree, a square, or a tomb can also be experienced as sacred spaces, if they become symbolic nodes of belonging and transformation.
This idea of sacrality embodied in space finds a powerful contemporary expression in artistic experiences such as the CROSS Festival , which every year brings dance, sound, and theater into historically and spiritually resonant places. The sacred landscapes of Lake Maggiore – such as the Sacro Monte of Ghiffa, the Church of Santa Marta in Verbania, or the Albagnano Healing Meditation Centre – become sensitive stages where art does not simply “occupy” space, but reactivates it, redefines it, , transforms it into a threshold.
Bibliografia
Antonella Cirigliano, senior lecturer and director, has been engaged for over twenty years in theatrical research and performing arts, with a training that began at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and was further developed with Enrique Vargas. Founder and Artistic Leader of Fondazione CROSS, she teaches Performing Techniques for the Visual Arts at NABA and directs festivals dedicated to the interaction between expressive practices. A former student of spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen and practitioner at the Healing Meditation Center in Albagnano (VB), her research weaves together performing arts, sensorial pathways, and spiritual practices oriented toward inner growth.
A journey into the aura of key practices and figures of spirituality and performance art between body, gesture and vision.
