Alessandro Sciarroni: Save the Last Dance for Me

Save the Last Dance for Me is a creation by Alessandro Sciarroni that explores polka chinata, an Italian folk dance. With origins in the early 1900s, it is a courtship dance typically performed by men, who embrace and whirl while bending their knees to the floor.

Sciarroni created a duet performance and a series of transmission workshops to promote and revive this once-popular tradition, nowadays in danger of extinction.

Workshop: Following Sunday’s performance, dancers Gianmaria Borzillo and Giovanfrancesco Giannini will host a workshop to teach polka chinata to the public. Borzillo says: “The workshop is for every kind of body, every age. The dance is difficult. It took us six months to learn. Mastering it isn’t the goal of the workshop.”

“The goal is to the save the dance — maybe not from extinction, but from memory loss. A folk dance survives as long as someone has a memory of it. People who come to the workshop may not be able to dance it completely, but they will know what it is, and that’s how it survives.”