elegìa delle cose perdute

notes on the project

The choreographic project Elegìa delle cose perdute (Elegy of Lost Things) is inspired by a corollary of readings which are predominantly existentialist and introspective. Among these mostly emerges the novel Os Pobres by the portuguese author and Historian Raul Brandao.

The landscape evoked by this literary reference, on the edge between raw, sour, dreamlike and illusory, reflects a nostalgia, a Sehnsucht, a memory as  matter that traces back our roots and identity and, at the same time, the separation from them and the feeling of moral exile that arises from it: a dream of impossible returns, anger facing the time that annihilates, a send-off from what is lost and that has marked the map of our inner journey.

In the investigation about the topos of exile, our desire is to explore, beyond its merely geographical meaning, the moral condition that concerns anyone who may feel alien to the world in which he/she lives, placing him/her in a state of suspension between past and future, hope and nostalgia. The desire that nostalgia carries along is not actually the desire for a static eternity, but for  ever newer genesis and for a place that remains, a place where you experience a rebirth as a living matter, that helps you to resist, to last, to change, a place where you can go without ever arriving, infinitely.

Which

story we would like to tell you.

I am nothing.

I'll never be anything.

I couldn't want to be something.

Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

(F. Pessoa)

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This is the tragicomic story of 7 souls: poor and derelict people, the humus of the world (R. Brandao). Worn out clothes, with earth nuances, badly cover the livid, pale skin to the point that the last light of the sunset seems to make it shine with gold. Their stories, despite their different kind of exiles to which they are subjected, have the same feeling of emptiness, generated by an inexorable absence. They share the same black misery inscribed in an uninterrupted present, of a clownish and tender sadness. From time to time the minor euphony of simple and popular songs whispered to the sky at night accompanies them or a melancholy pace of a nostalgic waltz comes through. What remains of their actions, of their useless efforts is the story of a feeling of lost things. Among them a poet named Gabirù is living there, suspended on the edge of this scenic space that has the colors of a post station or of a frontier.  Everything they treat as boundary without a handhold, an embankment, a fulfillment, a conclusion, for the poet is the hyperbole from a here and now that is the beginning, trespassing, invitation to travel, to crossing, to a metamorphosis.

From the confine of the present, Gabirù's words move his stage mates beyond the purgatory of forgetfulness and noise, within a poetic and silent time, no longer distant but livable, transitable. A nostalgia for things that never happened, of a small never lost homeland, the place of an invented memory, a past, a present, a future thought on the figures of this invention. 

The words and the dance of the poet trace the hyperbole towards the redemption of a promised land. The place where you can go without ever reaching it, through a desire, a somersault of your thought, a spiral of the heart, the over a hedge-limit of Leopardian memory, from which one can contemplate the disarming beauty of infinity. This dance swings between inexorable expectations and a multiplication of vectors and directions, it is vertigo, it is abandonment, it has the shape of a nostalgic sadness that asks to be celebrated, of bodies that become landscape, form of the flow of time, of memory and of hope, as the founding matters of life itself, which is always a crossing, not to possess but to belong. So within this logic  suddenly any misery or poverty are no longer possible, there is nothing left that can really be lost.

May life follow its splendid course. It has a dream and iron flavour. It's tenderness, disgrace, desperation. It takes us in, it drags us, it pushes us, it fills us up with illusion, it scatters us to every corner of the globe. It bruises us. It raises us. It knocks us out. It protects us. It drenches us in the same muddy vortex. It kills us. However, even just for a moment, it forces us to look up and until the end we remain with loopy eyes. (R. Brandao)

Around the film project

The creative process that leads to the realization of Elegìa delle cose perdute runs through its Sardinian choreographic residences, lending itself to the creation of a larger film and photographic project co-created by the choreographer Stefano Mazzotta and the filmmaker Massimo Gasole. The geographies of Sardinia (among them the small town of Settimo San Pietro with its Cuccuru Nuraxi and the ancient Campidanese houses, the beaches of the south east coast, the Don Bosco refuge in Cagliari) become the setting where the poetic characters of the novel by Raul Brandao find their home. The lens focuses and weaves together the solitary stories of 8 derelict and clumsy figures, united by the same feeling of melancholy nostalgia and desire for redemption. The space between the observer and these stories (and between these stories and the shared dream they tend to) is a distance that cannot be measured, the dimension of a finibusterrae which is a sense of precariousness, of suspension in a vacuum. As if you could expect at any moment the crumbling of the earth under your feet, sinking into the abyss, sinking into a sea that courts the earth like a patient lover. This measure, that we do not know how to conceive, makes the distant alive, tense, vibrant. It is the list of what the characters can no longer see, it is the distance that appears in the form of a border, the presence of elsewhere, a vertigo. On this open horizon, in this dancing filmic tale of bodies in migration, profiles of creatures and memories of stories stand out telling us the time and space of farewells, beauty, landscape, light, exile. Their stories invite us to strip ourselves of every name, to stop on the edge to the point where the land stretches over the sea. Between a burning need of Itaca and the anxiety of another journey, between a real border and an imaginary encroachment, a refuge and a mirage, into a story which, by vice or virtue, the people of finibusterrae always transform into legend to be told to foreigners and to themselves. 

info and

credits

progetto, regia e coreografia/project, direction and choreography

Stefano Mazzotta

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creato con e interpretato da/created with and interpreted by

Alessio Rundeddu, Amina Amici, Damien Camunez, Gabriel Beddoes, Manuel Martin, Miriam Cinieri, Simone Zambelli

partecipazioni speciali/special guests

Antonio Piovanelli, Bonaria Ghironi, Elena Ledda, Loredana Parrella, Mauro Palmas, Sara Angius

Simonetta Soro

collaborazione alla drammaturgia/collaboration to the dramaturgy

Anthony Mathieu, Fabio Chiriatti

progetto video/video project

Massimo Gasole/Illador Film, Damiano Picciau, ​Alberto Masala

make up

Federica Li

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luci/lights

Tommaso Contu

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segreteria di produzione/production assistant

Maria Elisa Carzedda

produzione/production

Zerogrammi

coproduzione/coproduction

Tersicorea/direzione artistica Simonetta Pusceddu(It), La meme balle – Avignon (Fr), La Nave del Duende - Cacderes (Sp), Festival Danza Estate - Bergamo (It)

in collaborazione con/in collaboration with

CASA LUFT, Arca del Tempo, Cooperativa Specus, Comune di Settimo S. Pietro, Comune di Selargius, Comune di Sinnai, Comune di Quartucciu, Comune di Quartu Sant’Elena, Associazione Turistica Pro Loco Settimo San Pietro

con il contributo di/with the contribution of

INTERCONNESSIONI/Tersicorea, PERIFERIE ARTISTICHE - Centro di Residenza Multidisciplinare della Regione Lazio - Supercinema, Tuscania, Fondazione di Sardegna

con il sostegno di/with the support of

Soprintendenza Archeologica Belle Arti e Paesaggio per la Città Metropolitana di Cagliari e le Province di Oristano e Sud Sardegna, Regione Sardegna, Regione Piemonte, MIBAC - Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali

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