“The sirens keep rising to the surface of our present from the whirlpools of our imagination because they remain symbols of the fluidity of being—an elusive state in which we struggle to recognise ourselves. At times, we might mistake the pulse of our own blood, resonating in a seashell, for the echo of the sea. Their song reverberates in us like the voice of a lover—Nature herself—who seems poised to speak, only to turn away, misunderstood, and sink once more into the depths of her mystery.”
— from Sirene by Elisabetta Moro

Across all their genealogies, the Sirens carry a precise symbolic weight. As Elisabetta Moro notes in her book (Sirene, 2023), they can be seen as benevolent or malevolent depending on the time and the gaze: song, seduction, lament, passage, liminality, knowledge, fertility or its denial, duplicity, hybridity, the underworld, disobedience, subversion, the founding of cities.

They are figures—bodies—that inhabit or arrive upon foreign shores, resting on their edges, shipwrecked. According to Homeric myth, three founded three cities: Parthenope, in her shipwreck, gave birth to Naples. Virgins who refused marriage, barren beings to whom myth nonetheless entrusted the creation of communities. Feathered or scaled, they have always embodied the in-between—incarnations of difference on many levels. Dissident and dangerous for all these reasons, they once lured the curious with their song, and later with their bodies, into the greatest disobedience of all: to leave homeland and family in pursuit of knowledge.
They seduce not to consume, but to let one die of hunger. Yet they are also wise, prophetic beings—and it is precisely this wisdom that draws those who encounter them.

This is the story we have inherited. Their form has shifted over time because the gaze upon them has shifted.
Every place, every gaze, reinvents them. And so the Sirens remain singular in their history—and astonishingly contemporary.

The Sirene project emerges from years of workshops led since 2017 and from Genealogia (2018–2022), a long-term research in which Luna Cenere investigated the body and the origins of thought on the body, sharing her theoretical and practical findings through participatory processes in Italy and abroad. Starting from the idea that the way we think about the body is also the way we relate to our own and to others’, she devised a series of physical practices that allow participants to inhabit the body—and the space between bodies—in ways that strip away the “habits” of thought and perception born of preconceptions or social conditioning. From there, one can return to a deep listening of the inner breath, and allow posture and gesture to arise that embrace one’s authentic self and one’s difference as something vital—while entering into empathy with the other.

Inspired by the myth of the Siren, Luna Cenere embarks on a new work dedicated to Naples, whose founding myth is Parthenope—both dissident and generative. Her aim is to refract the mythological through the physical, philosophical, and political dimensions of the body.
A contemporary, revolutionary myth that reopens questions of duality, of the feminine, and even the very definitions of ethno-genealogical belonging.

SIRENE
community project
Choreography and concept Luna Cenere
assistant and performer Ilaria Quaglia
music Renato Grieco
technical management Mattia Santangelo
logo Giovanni Frasconi
project manager Fulvia Orifici
executive production Associazione Culturale Zebra

Original project for the Dance and Body Language section of the Extra Fringe Special Projects category of the first edition of the Napoli Fringe Festival 2025 celebrating the 2500th anniversary of the founding of Neapolis, under the artistic direction of Laura Valente

Special thanks to Rosalba Ruggeri for her assistance in writing the project.