Tracing the Disappeared Videodance Festivals of Italy

The focus of this short paper is on Italy’s first videodance festivals that emerged in the beginning of the 1990s and contributed to the flourishing of screendance, known in Italian as videodanza (videodance). Pioneers of this kind of audiovisual curation have been the Naples-based festival known as Il Coreografo Elettronico (1990); the Danza & Video festival (1991) -- later transformed into an open archive known as Cro.me. -- and the recently “resurrected” festival Teatro Televisione Video TTVV (1985) in the region of Riccione in the Adriatic part of Italy. Employing web research in combination with bibliographic material and oral testimonies, this research looks at the reasons that instigated the emergence of these festivals, their modes of survival and resistance in time prior to their disappearance or evolution and the practice of curation before the rise of web and digital facilities. In this way, this preliminary inquiry hopes to inform the current ways of screendance curation, dissemination and appreciation across Italy and abroad.