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A Moving Museum 

In “Me Time—Danza al Museo” by choreographer Camilla Monga, dance becomes a tool for deeper seeing. Through choreography, the museum becomes a space of cognitive and emotional activation. The result is an encounter that lingers long after the performance ends.

Performance

“Me Time—Danza al Museo” by Camilla Monga

Place

Palazzo Maffei, Verona, Italy, March 2026

Words

Greta Pieropan

“Me Time—Danza al Museo” by Camilla Monga. Photograph courtesy of Palazzo Maffei Verona

Some performances refuse to fade, even long after the date on the ticket has lost its relevance. “Me Time—Danza al Museo” is one of them. What lingers is not an event, but an encounter: a dancer moving through Palazzo Maffei, activating senses that traditional museum visits often leave dormant. The Verona museum—an idiosyncratic, carefully curated home for centuries of artistic imagination—has long resisted the stereotype of the static institution, with rooms arranged like a sequence of intuitions rather than a chronology. Into this already lively environment, “Me Time—Danza al Museo,” conceived by choreographer Camilla Monga with sound artist Federica Furlani, introduced the concept of amplification into the rooms.

The performance unfolded through the presence of a solo dancer, Marcello Malchiodi, a wonderful dancer, graduate of the Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi in Milan, where Monga teaches. His dancing—alert, tensile, and quietly attentive—tuned into the museum’s rhythms. Moving through the second floor, he seemed to pick up the frequencies already present in the space and make them bigger: a shift of weight near a Renaissance painting revealed the subtle choreography embedded in its composition; a spiral phrase beside a modernist sculpture underlined the sculptor’s own sense of motion.

Rather than “activating” the museum, the dancer activated the visitors, sharpening their perception, slowing the gaze, and inviting a more embodied forms of attention. Palazzo Maffei’s artistry, its juxtapositions, its architectural lines, its curatorial wit, became newly legible through the lens of movement. Furlani’s soundscape deepened this sensory expansion: with headphones isolating each visitor in a private auditory world, the museum’s rooms acquired distinct atmospheres, almost turning in microclimates. 

“Me Time—Danza al Museo” by Camilla Monga. Photograph courtesy of Palazzo Maffei Verona

“Me Time—Danza al Museo” by Camilla Monga. Photograph courtesy of Palazzo Maffei Verona

This approach places “Me Time” within a long lineage of dance in museums, but with a crucial difference. Historically, choreographers entering museum spaces (from Anna Halprin and Simone Forti to Xavier Le Roy and Boris Charmatz) often did so to critique the institution’s stillness or authority. Monga’s work recognizes the sensory openness of Palazzo Maffei and responds in kind, collaborating with it.

This kind of collaboration is not only aesthetic but cognitive: neuroscience has long shown that watching movement activates the brain’s mirror‑neuron system (discovered in Parma in the 1990s). When we observe a dancer, our motor cortex fires as if we were performing the movement ourselves: in a museum context, this means that dance doesn’t simply accompany artworks, but it changes the viewer’s state, activating the brain for deeper engagement.

Movement also reshapes spatial awareness: a dance‑guided experience re-maps the museum in the visitor’s mind, anchoring artworks in spatial‑motor memory rather than purely visual recall. And then there is attention: a dancer’s shift of tempo or direction acts as a cognitive reset, interrupting habituation and sharpening the gaze; while it also activates affective resonance systems, heightening empathy and deepening engagement. The European project Dancing Museums (2015–2021) articulated many of these potentials, demonstrating how dance can foster embodied perception, emotional openness, and new forms of audience engagement. 

“Me Time” feels like a natural evolution of that research: it uses dance to expand the museum experience, and one body moving through centuries of art becomes a kind of tuning fork, and his vulnerability reveals the vitality of the artworks, gifting the visitors with a guide that shares not through information but through sensation.

Greta Pieropan


Greta Pieropan likes to define herself as ‘your friendly neighbourhood dramaturg.’ She works as a dance dramaturg with artists, collectives, and communities to build thought, structure, and narrative within creative processes. She believes in dramaturgy as a relational practice—one that generates context, listening and accessibility. She’s also a professional shapeshifter: from dramaturgy in the rehearsal room, to project development, to moderating public conversations, to workshops, digital and traditional communication for live performance, she’s always backstage ready to support the dance scenes.

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