Dance lessons in art museums during office hours, among paintings, for Parkinson’s patients, cancer patients and survivors, and people suffering from depression. Sounds impossible, but it is possible and helpful, proven by Roberto Casarotto, a prominent dance activist, who promotes interdisciplinary approaches and practices of experts in dance, neuroscience, and visual arts, in various dance programs in museums in Italy (his homeland), other European countries, Japan, and Hong Kong, helping patients with those health issues.
Casarotto is a former contemporary dancer and the creator of “Dance Well – movement research for Parkinson,” a dance program initiated in 2013 by the Centro per la Scena Contemporanea (CSC) in Bassano del Grappa, Italy.
He is also the co-director of Aerowaves, the European Platform for Dance, which promotes cross-border mobility for emerging dance artists and runs several capacity-building programs for emerging choreographers, writers, curators, and podcasters. He also curated events and developed international projects supported by the EU Creative Europe and Erasmus Programs, and held the position of Artistic Director of Balletto di Roma.
In the last two decades, Casarotto has visited Israel several times, including in March of this year, during the war, as he revealed in this exclusive interview with the Magazine, also to show support and respect for the Israeli dance community and his Israeli colleagues.
Last week, he presented the idea of “Dance and Brain Health in Museums” as a guest speaker at The Machol Shalem Dance House Festival, Jerusalem International Dance Week, and at the “Everybody” conference, organized by the Yasmeen Godder dance company, as part of the “Moving Communities” project, in Tel Aviv – Jaffa.
He also gave a demonstration class and a lecture on the same subject at the Italian Cultural Institute in Tel Aviv.
Casarotto began the lesson by asking the participants to look at the sky (instead of paintings in a museum) and remember colors they saw, and to locate them in the room. Next, he asked to imagine walking on clouds, touching the clouds and stars, thus creating dancing constellations.
During this imaginative dance improvisation to music, strangers completed the lesson as a united group. “The group experience can also be a healing,” he told me.
He added: “In contact with art, the act of dance becomes a poetic and enlivening experience, offering benefits to participants on both a physical and emotional level.”
Nonetheless, he emphasized that dancing in museums is not dance therapy, but dance lessons, which help activate brain functioning, crucial in many physical and mental conditions.
When I read about what you do, it seemed so relevant to the situation of many in Israel struggling with anxiety and depression caused by the war and ongoing trauma.
Yes, it makes sense. I’ve been in dialogue with people here in Israel for many years, and also during those last years. I’m a bit aware of what’s been going on. I was here in March [2025], during the war. The Kelim Choreography Center invited me to attend one of their festivals and to meet their dance communities.
When you come here, you experience what life is about, so I had my first Tzeva Adom [Red Alert, a siren], and it was a new thing for me. I came here many times before, but never during a conflict.
When did you first visit Israel?
I think it was 2003. My visits were usually connected to dance festivals.Also, this time. I was in Jerusalem for the dance festival this week, organized by Machol Shalem [Dance House].
Did anything surprise you during this visit?
I had a very interesting conversation with four male dancers with an Orthodox [not ultraorthodox, as he explained] background from one of the performances I saw in Jerusalem.
They began their creative process [before the war], then they were called into the reserves, to different fronts. When they came back into the studio, the choreographer worked with them only artistically. He didn’t ask for their personal stories. Some of them were in the north of the country, some in Gaza, others in the West Bank. I imagine when they came back together, it was a kind of emotional shock.
It is interesting to hear how being busy in a creative process, where you bring your body into the art, and sometimes don’t talk about your psychological experiences, created a beautiful choreographic construction. Even in an abstract piece, you could still see the complexity of what these four men went through.
You don’t need a therapeutic approach. Sometimes, a good artistic practice is enough to overcome many of these experiences or support people on their journey, or maybe even motivate them to get out of the house for a few hours and spend time together, contributing to the creation of something to share with an audience.
That’s truly important. Before moving to your fascinating idea of dancing in museums, what led you to that idea?
I’ve been a professional contemporary dancer for 14 years, and then I moved more to the organizational side. I’ve worked at a big festival, Operaestate Festival in Bassano del Grappa. (In this tiny city in northern Italy, I’ve often collaborated with artists from Israel. We presented their works, but we also commissioned works.)
I started to dive into this festival and dance house. In 2016, we launched a big European project related to Hieronymus Bosch and the 500th anniversary of his death. We connected museums that hold his artworks, including the Louvre, Gemäldegalerie in Vienna, and the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, and we started to explore how dance could bring new experiences for the visitors in museums.
A<strong>s a dance performance, or rather a participating experience?</strong>
Dance as an experience. We were looking for ways to engage the visitors with their bodies in new forms of dialogue with the artworks. A bit intuitively.
Who do you mean by ‘we’?
From the start, there was a core group of dancers with whom we collaborated, and later on, also museum experts, scientists (especially dealing with neurology), and people studying the impact of dance on social dimensions. The journey has been shared to the point that the neuro-aesthetic scientists started to give language to things that we [dancers] were intuitively putting in place, like bringing a dance practice inside a museum. We felt we could connect with the artworks; we could use imagination to trigger movement and connections.
In those dance lessons, how much is improvisation and how much is directed?
We work mainly with Parkinson’s patients, people living with and beyond cancer, and lately with young people who live with psychological vulnerability and depression. It all began with Parkinson’s, because it’s often described as a lack of motivation disease. Intellectual motivation, but also physical difficulties. It inspired and triggered the topic of generating motivations, which can also be applied to professional dancers.
Some dance artists [who teach] have received specific training on a scientific basis. So when they welcome people, they don’t ask them if they have a pathology, but can estimate, by studying how a body moves.
Is it mostly contemporary dance?
It could be any dance, because we have teachers who are professional ballet, hip hop, and ballroom dancers. But what we do is we work on improvisation. We create choreographic scores that we guide with the voice. They trigger movement, and initiating movement is more impactful for the brain, for the neuroplasticity, which is the ability of the brain to connect things, than learning a set choreography. This is what the scientists told us. But intuitively, we had always operated through improvisation.
It sounds a bit like Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s Eurythmic method of interpreting music through body movement and rhythm.
Yes, but we trigger movement through art and imagination. We trigger meaning or the building of meanings. And this is something that people who live with those pathologies can take with them into their daily life.
So how does such a lesson start? People look at the paintings, hear music, and then they start dancing. It depends. Sometimes there’s a clear and direct reference to some elements in a painting, for example. Sometimes it’s more of a general suggestion that you have. We adapt and respond to what happens in a class, because you may have prepared something, and then you meet people who don’t move much. So you have to change your own agenda and respond to that. And this is something that dance artists can do.
The improvisation is a fantastic tool because when you’re invited to become a flower that grows towards the sun, there are at least 25,000 ways to do that. And each of them is equally valid. We try to leave the judgment outside the room.
Are these lessons one-time classes or a regular series?
Not single meetings. In Italy, we always engage organizations and museums in the shared responsibility. When you start these things, they should not stop, because they have an impact on people’s lives; you cannot allow yourself to stop after three months.
So it’s like therapy, once a week, for example?
Well, we call it art. We know it has a therapeutic impact, but we don’t call it therapy. Also, because the people who are in therapy all the time would never come to an activity that is called therapy. So it’s not dance therapy, it’s dance. It’s super artistic. The classes are visible to museum visitors, who often join them.
In May this year, we started to focus on work with people dealing with depression.
As I began our conversation, that could be relevant to many people in Israel, who have just gone or are still going through trauma... I also think of the resonant motto of the past two years in Israel: “We will dance again”… Dancing in museums, just as I observed and experienced tonight at your demonstrational class in Tel Aviv, can open up people.
It really pushes boundaries because you’re exposed to something that’s emotionally, empathetically, and physically different from what we’re used to seeing in stereotypes of the dancing body. Dance offers people a healing opportunity that goes beyond pharmacological aspects. And it frees them from internal and external isolation. I think, at this point, dance, above all, brings people together.
I believe that dance can change people’s lives. It’s the art forms that connect us to our body and to humanity the most, also in terms of recognizing the humans in front of us. Certain activities can produce changes in societies, in the way people behave or think. And in that sense, I often say that dance can provoke slow revolutions in places where that happens. So it has happened in museums.