stefano mazzotta/zerogrammi 2018-2020
elegìa delle cose perdute
Blessed are the moments,
millimeters and shadows
of the little things.
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(F. Pessoa)
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)
Travel diary
2019
10.2018 - 01.2019 | LUFT, Turin (Ita)
(residence of creation) DRAMATURGY AND CONTEXT
02.2019 - 05.2019 | LUFT, Turin (ita)
(residence of creation) INTERPRETERS AND CHARACTERS
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06.2019 | PERIFERIE ARTISTICHE, Supercinema | Tuscania (Ita)
SPACE AND ACTIONS
07.2019 | INTERCONNESSIONI
Cuccuru Nuraxi | Settimo S. Pietro (Ita)
THE TALE CANVAS
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10.2019 | NID - Italian Dance Platform
Reggio Emilia (Ita)
OPEN STUDIO
2020
02.2020 -07.2020 | ONLINE ACTIVITIES DUE TO COVID19 EMERGENCY
STORY AND CHARACTERS/ "ISOLE" PROJECT
08.2020 -09.2020 | INTERCONNESSIONI
THE TALE CANVAS + PERFORMANCES
2021
11..2020 | INTERCONNESSIONI + LAVANDERIA A VAPORE
PREMIERE + "RESIDENZE TRAMPOLINO" ("WALTZ" PROJECT)
on tour
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
soggetto, regia e coreografia/subject, direction and choreography
Stefano Mazzotta
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una riscrittura da/a rewrite from
Os Pobres di/by Raul Brandao
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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
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collaborazione alla drammaturgia/collaboration to the dramaturgy
Anthony Mathieu, Fabio Chiriatti, Francesca Cinalli
progetto video/video project
Massimo Gasole/Illador Film, Damiano Picciau, ​Alberto Masala
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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
Festival Danza Estate - Bergamo (It), La meme balle – Avignon (Fr), La Nave del Duende - Cacderes (Sp)
in collaborazione con/in collaboration with
CASA LUFT, Arca del Tempo, Comune di Settimo S. Pietro, Comune di Selargius
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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produzione/production 2018-2020
disponibilità /availability (plein air creation) 06.2020 / (theatrical) 11.2020
genere/genre TEATRODANZA/DANCETHEATRE
durata/duration 60 min.
pubblico/audience +13
scena/stage MEDIUM TO LARGE HALL / suitable for SHORT FORMAT, SITE SPECIFIC and PLEIN AIR STAGES
staff artistico e tecnico in tour/artistic and technical team on tour 7+2
trasporto scenografie e materiali/prop transportation AL SEGUITO/PROVIDED BY THE COMPANY
montaggi e prove in loco/set up lights-scenes and rehearsals 1 to 2 d.
smontaggi/disassembly 3 h
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EXTRA CREDITS (progetto filmico e fotografico/filmic and photographic project)
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soggetto e fotografie/subject and photography
Stefano Mazzotta
direzione delle riprese, collaborazione alla regia
 e post produzione/direction of the shooting, collaboration in the direction and post production
Massimo Gasole
partecipazioni speciali/special guests
Antonio Piovanelli, Bonaria Ghironi, Elena Ledda, Elisa Zedda, Loredana Parrella, Mauro Palmas, Sara Angius, Simonetta Soro
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direzione della fotografia/direction of photography
Damiano Picciau
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riprese aeree e operatore di backstage/aerial shots and backstage operator
Alberto Masara
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suono/sound
Emanuele Pusceddu
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trucco e parrucco/hair and makeup
Federica Li
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con il contributo di/with the contribution of
INTERCONNESSIONI residenze Artistiche in Sardegna - direzione artistica Simonetta Pusceddu
(Ai sensi dell’Intesa Stato/Regioni sancita il 21.9.2017 e in attuazione dell’articolo 43 del D.M. 27.7.2017)
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con il sostegno di/with the support of
MIBAC - Ministero per i beni e le Attività Culturali, Regione autonoma della Sardegna, Regione Piemonte, Fondazione Banco di Sardegna, Soprintendenza Archeologica, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per la Città Metropolitana di Cagliari e le Province di Oristano e Sud Sardegna
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in collaborazione con/in collaboration with
ILISSO/libri d'arte e cultura - Nuoro, PERIFERIE ARTISTICHE-Centro di Residenza Multidisciplinare della Regione Lazio, Comune di Settimo S. Pietro, CASA LUFT, T OFF - Officina delle Arti Sceniche, Illador films, Cooperativa Specus Cagliari, Comune di Selargius, Comune di Sinnai, Comune di Quartucciu
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un ringraziamento a/thanks to
Alessandro Baldussi/Casa Baldussi, Casa Pilleri, Casa Campidanese Zuddas di Angelo e Sara Fadelli (fine sec. XVII), Casa comunale Dessy, Casa privata Dessy, Elisabetta Milia, Sandro Perra
Raffaele Lai, Salvatore Medda
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