Le radici nel cielo. Dove la pedagogia incontra il funambolismo

This essay, being the result of the first Phd year and of ten-year fieldwork , wants to investigate the possible positive contamination between two different disciplines: pedagogy and tightrope walking. Supporting the idea that pedagogy should favour the vital balance for each human being (Durand, 1963/2013; Jousse, 1974/1979) and considering tightrope walking one of the best examples of discipline applying this (Petit, 2014) the project sees in the tightrope walker's self-training and training a preferential field to be pedagogically investigated, considering the peculiarity of balance as a permanently dynamics condition and its possible contributions for those who work in educational contexts. The tightrope experience needs to accept new rules, in order to enter a space and a time completely different from daily routine, where the vertigo and height symbols become concrete during the material walk. The tightrope walking discipline, being so essential and complex and the same time, needs a peculiar care: something in performer's imagination must be true and real (Brooke, 2012), that means alive, totally participating in each moment: this is the only way to come across the empty space in order to amaze and seduce his audience. In order to do so, imagination (Durand, 1964/1999) is an essential cognitive faculty, and the performer's imaginative capability is not something merely theoretical but something concrete, used to transform our usual posture which is no more frontal and dominant but open to meet and communicate with the others. If it is true that education is a process implying the human being's trans-formation thanks to an encounter (Antonacci, 2012), the tightrope walker's self-training and training process allows to experience a new kind of reality where the traditional boundaries between body and mind, sense and sensibility, earth and sky, micro and macrocosm become less distinct and more fluctuating. A new kind of balance is in the running and it needs efforts and strains, discipline and freedom in order to support the body-mind whole in the gesture of walking, the easiest and most natural for a human being but at the same time the most complex and structured. The experience is presented in a condensed way, during the performance as well as during the educational act. We are in front of a body-mind whole able to allay the mind, making it concrete in the present to give birth to a transformed body (Stanislaviskji, 1938/2000), heroic (Grotowski, 1968/1970), a body of art in which authenticity and live presence are essential (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1990/ 1991). These elements are fundamental even for those who daily work and investigate the educational and pedagogic field, looking for a research whose aim is interwaving and linking more than dividing, able to put again into action the polymorphous archetypes and the intensity of symbolic horizons (Wunenbuerger, 2007).