Performing arts in education: an embodied experience of caring for fragility through relationships

Performing arts represent a valid pedagogical and transformative experience for the person inhabiting the current time of fragility. Bodies, isolated from the pandemic, are brought back to the centre of educational institutions and social contexts of marginality. The emotional-bodily and affective-relational dimensions return as protagonists of the training processes. Through the mechanisms of embodied simulation (Gallese & Guerra, 2015) and liberated simulation (Gallese, 2010), which bring us to the knowledge of the neurophysiological processes of movement activation and emotions’ expression, performing arts contribute significantly to the development of the relationship of the subjects involved in the performing practices, improving the ability to recognise the other as different from oneself. According to the perspective of intersubjectivity and intercorporeality (Ammaniti & Gallese, 2014), the relationship as solicitude (Ricoeur, 1997) leads to structure the integral human and global growth and heals fragilities, in the frame of the contact leading to express and manifest, with and through the body, experiences and deep emotions transformed into art and beauty for the observer.