This reportage tells the story of the place where the oldest community of Break Dance dancers in Italy trains. It is the exterior of the Teatro Regio in Turin. An unlikely yet indissoluble couple, bound together by music: an opera house that welcomes break dancers. A unique place, probably the point of arrival of break dancing in Italy. It's "The Regio", a community of dancers, a home where they can meet, train, learn an art, become themselves.
The project was realised during a full-time masterclass with ICP International Center of Photography, in collaboration with Camera Centro Italiano per la Fotografia.
The work consists of a series of photographs and a short film.
1973 saw the inauguration of the new Teatro Regio in Turin, the wonderful architectural project of Carlo Mollino, a famous italian architect who, after the disastrous fire that destroyed the theatre, returned an opera house with a modernist flavour to the city.
To welcome the spectators, Mollino designed a grandiose Atrium, corresponding to the theatre's old carriage hall. This is the Galleria Tamagno, a space covered in precious materials that mix tradition and modernity: marble and granite for the floors; metal and glass for the walls. In addition to theatre audiences, the gallery is immediately frequented by street artists, skaters and dancers, who choose it as a place for their training sessions. In fact, the gallery, with its smooth and even floor, is the perfect place to skate and dance.
It was here, in the early 1980s, that a peculiar phenomenon occurred: people who had learned to dance on roller skates began to hear about Hip Hop culture, thanks to cassettes and vinyl records arriving from the United States. Someone goes to New York, to the Bronx in particular, and returns to Turin with some new, never-before-seen moves: that strange and new way of dancing is called break dancing, a street dance characterised by spectacular acrobatics and strengthful movements, that defy gravity. Gradually, some roller skaters began taking off their skates, to better experience this new dance.
A perfect location, a young and curious community, an unknown dance: the perfect ingredients. for the phenomenon to explode. Break dancing spreads rapidly, conquering dancers of all ages, who call themselves b-boys and b-girls, following American usage.
The place where they train is always the same, the Tamagno Gallery of the Regio Theatre, which with its smooth floor allows bodies to glide better and avoid injuries, creating choreographies that would be impossible on bare asphalt. From now on, among break-dancers, this place will be known simply as ‘Il Regio’.
Some claim that the Regio was actually the first place where Break-Dance arrived in Italy directly from New York, and from there it spread throughout Italy. There is no way to verify this, but certainly the Regio was in the early 1980s a key player in the development of Italian Hip Hop culture.
Even today, this place is still frequented by dancers eager to train or learn break-dancing. This place is a veritable institution of Italian break dancing, a marble temple capable of attracting dancers from all over the world and fostering a unique contamination and evolution of style.
Over time, much of the gallery has been closed and is only accessible on evenings when the theatre is open for shows and performances. Anyway, a small side area of the Galleria Tamagno was offered to the dancers quietly allowing them to still dance and train there. It is interesting to observe how, between the Dancers and the Theatre, still exists a unique coexistence of two very different identities, inextricably linked by music since their birth.
