Italian Rituals is a long-term, practice-based research project situated at the intersection of performance studies, art history, and ritual theory. The work is grounded in decades of engagement with Italian language, visual culture, and urban life, alongside formal academic study of Italian Renaissance art history, with particular focus on chapel decoration from approximately 1380–1520, from Giotto through the High Renaissance.

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This period—marked by the development of sequential narrative, perspectival space, choreographed bodies, and affective spectatorship—forms a critical foundation for the project. Early chapel cycles functioned as immersive environments designed to move the viewer physically, emotionally, and spiritually through space. Read through a contemporary lens, these painted cycles may be understood as proto-cinematic: among the first “moving pictures,” in which meaning unfolds through bodily movement, temporal progression, and durational viewing rather than through a single fixed image.

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Recent site-responsive performances along the Appia Antica and Via Tiburtina extend this lineage into contemporary practice. These ancient roads—long understood as processional and funerary corridors—become performative spaces where walking operates as both method and medium. Drawing on principles of sequential narration and embodied spectatorship inherited from Renaissance visual culture, the performances engage movement, pause, and spatial orientation as tools for activating historical landscapes as living archives of memory.​

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Conceived as an evolving inquiry rather than a finite series, Italian Rituals aligns with the research frameworks proposed in my Fulbright and Rome Prize applications. The project contributes to broader interdisciplinary conversations around embodied historiography, ritual performance as research methodology, and the role of the moving body in reactivating cultural heritage sites—positioning performance as a means of cultural listening across time.

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From Chapel Cycle to Moving Image to Performance: The project is theoretically grounded in the understanding of late medieval and Renaissance chapel decoration as an early form of immersive, time-based visual experience. Narrative fresco cycles from Giotto through the High Renaissance were designed to be encountered sequentially through bodily movement, guiding the viewer through space, gesture, and affect. These environments anticipated key principles later formalized in cinema: montage through adjacency, durational viewing, choreographed bodies as carriers of meaning, and the activation of empathy through narrative progression. Contemporary performance extends this lineage by returning movement to the viewer’s body itself. In Italian Rituals, performance functions as a living continuation of the chapel cycle and the cinematic experience—where meaning emerges not from representation alone, but from the participant’s movement through space, time, and memory. Ritual performance thus becomes a form of embodied spectatorship, reanimating historical visual strategies through the lived presence of the body.

Parallel to this research is an extensive history of experimental street theatre in Italian cities, including Rome, Venice, and Florence. This public-facing practice has informed the project’s emphasis on immediacy, improvisation, and reciprocal presence, dissolving conventional boundaries between performer, site, and audience. Street performance operates here as a contemporary analogue to historical ritual forms—ephemeral, accessible, and embedded within everyday life.