Long before the pandemic, some museum started to invest, experimenting with performative practices (Bishop; Lista; De Nicola, Garcia Sottile, Gómez Lozano) as a method and tool to foster access and participation of different audiences to their heritage.

The 2020/21 world wide quarantine has made it necessary to reconsider the spaces dedicated to culture and education, assigning an essential role to the digital. This radical change implied a rethinking of the methodologies to maintain the relationship between publics and institutions, finding in practice and performing methodologies a possible effective answer. The first and most immediate response was to significantly fill the vacuum of museum halls/classrooms caused by the absence of audiences.

Starting from the participatory role, entrusted in particular to dance within the contexts mentioned above, this paper aims in general to analyse theories and practices, as well as to trace the elements useful for heritage education. Paraphrasing the words of Jean-Luc Nancy, dance will be observed as a movement capable of touching or, helping us with the latin language, of cum movere that is of coming into contact, stimulating the senses in the perception of space and other bodies, going beyond the emotional dimension of the previous words, but highlighting how the perception of touch occurs at the moment of distance. 

In this particular phase, the value of the relationship between time, space and the performative act is even more evident. 

Although gesture, by different definition, is an expression of the present, whatever the present in which it occurs or is perceived (Agamben). The performer particular condition in action allows to be a bridge between the past and the present, between lived experiences, synchronicity and asynchronicity, that is between what has been and will continue to be the dilemma of trainers, educators and disseminators in those new times. This is a process of encountering the self, the others and the surrounding reality ( Sieni). 

Dance, consisting of concentrated postures in movement, which therefore invites the viewer by its nature to a reflective approach, represents a powerful language to directly mediate content normally perceived as distant because it is covered by a specialised aura. As the neurobiologist Lucy Vincent states "dance is a magnificent tool for exploration, research, understanding, intelligence and expression". Taking as a pretext Nijinsky's words "the dancer is a philosopher who does not think", the choreographic gesture will be analysed as a tool for the creation of an "embodied knowledge" (Lepecki; Metta, Di Donato) i.e. knowledge that originates from a feeling, crossing and places of life, mainly through the body (Cunti; Bruzzone).What has been described above can find new relations in the field of educational research: so far the research paradigm has moved between the theoretical framework of active and informal methodologies (Dewey; Moscati, Nigris,Tramma) and that of didactic mediation (Shulman; Damiano; Rivoltella, Rossi). A number of action research experiences during the quarantine showed how a performative approach to teaching (particularly of art) was useful and, given the premises, could be so in the future. The outcome of the paper, is the reconsideration of the body as a mediator of the educational (Gamelli, Hooper-Hill) and training experience. On the one hand we see the "body as archive" (Lepecki) for new knowledge, on the other hand the space of digital educational activities is reified, thanks to this new role of the body. The instrument of this new relationship with the real is the performative practice, through a process of deconstruction opposed to the traditional educational practice.

We usually attribute to Leonardo Da Vinci the affirmation that art is a silent poem, in which instead of words we find images that, as long as we reason on figurative art, find vitality in gesture. The gesture which, as Agamben states, is "the exhibition of a pure mediality, the rendering visible of a medium as such, in its emancipation from all purpose".[...] In the gesture one does not know something, but only a knowability"....] In the gesture one does not know something, but only a knowability". These characteristics lead to the identification from the point of view of educational research of heritage education as a process, based on experience (Dewey). Contextually, the medium of educational action (performance) is a set of artistic acts (Read). So far the research paradigm has moved between the theoretical framework of active and informal methodologies (Dewey; Moscati, Nigris, Tramma) and that of didactic mediation (Shulman; Damiano; Rivoltella, Rossi). This active aspect finds fertile ground in performance methodologies, which see action as their essence.The focus is on performance as a cognitive methodology (Miliani, Vincent), whose protagonist is the body. The perceptive experience of space takes place through the body (Acconci, Brown, Forsythe) according to what Merleau-Ponty defines as the "phenomenology of perception". Drawing a parallel with pedagogical studies, we can make use of the words of the critic Gillo Dorfles on Art as Experience: "we could summarise Dewey's thought on the gnoseological function of art by saying that art makes use of a language that is not the logical-scientific one, but which is also a language capable of transmitting cognitive elements".Thus, to complete the theoretical framework we find the performance studies Turner) who exploit an anthropological approach (Schechner).

For a long time, places dedicated to art and cultural heritage have found in performance actions an answer to the growing need for participation, as a means of cultural access, by different audiences. In this respect, the definition of "ever-changing theatre scenes" (Alivizatou) is useful, referring to museums whose collections are constantly changing thanks to the increasing use of exhibition technologies. This paper aims to show how the experience of introducing performative methodologies in heritage education practice, increased during the quarantine period, can be a valid approach also in the future not mediated by device screens. Although in different disciplinary fields, the commonality between empiricist and performative methodologies allows us to observe that both in distance and in presence the experience can be really formative because it offers the possibility of personal and collective experimentation. The use of a variety of tools and the promotion of divergent thinking. The experience of a complex situation The possibility of making mistakes. The presence of several solutions. The developing and concluding theorisation. The connection with previous and future experiences (Zuccoli).

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