DALL'ALTRA PARTE

“Always together. In darkness, in waiting, in noise, in uncertainty, in fear, in hope, in good fortune and in bad. Always together, I swear it. I swear on this little cup, on this crust of bread and this little water, that I will never allow time to separate us. I swear on my skin, on my hands and on my lips. Always together, wherever we may be. On this side or the other side. And then you tell me… we will grow old together. And I tell you… we will grow young together. On my skin, on my hands and on my lips. And on everything else, I swear.”
— Stage writing materials by Silvia Battaglio

A house divided by a border — established by human beings following a temporary armistice — becomes a metaphor for waiting, for a suspended existence poised between reality and illusion.

Within it remain traces of old furnishings, while all around echo voices, explosions, sirens and the sounds of a battlefield.

Atom and Levana, survivors of an almost apocalyptic landscape, are a middle-aged couple living between two neighbouring countries at war. They spend their days inside their small broken house — dented, crooked, worn out — waiting for their beloved son, gone to war, to return and illuminate their present once more with hope.

Somewhere in the world there is a war — here or elsewhere — and there is a border physically dividing the house, just as it divides the lives of the two characters. Through the rhythmic repetition of mechanical daily actions, translated into a constant redefinition of space, their existence gradually slips into a condition of profound bewilderment, embodying a deeply human and contemporary state.

Though forced into separation and condemned to total uncertainty, Atom and Levana are driven by the perpetual desire to find one another again, to reunite, to reach the other side by crossing the border and restoring a form of relationship, human contact and closeness capable of making them feel alive once more.

Perpetually suspended between what once was and what no longer exists, the fragile and unstable existence of Atom and Levana must be reinvented through the only remaining means possible: imagination.

And it is precisely through imagination that Atom and Levana construct a new existence, fantasizing the strangest things, even imagining that their discarded clothes might somehow give shape to the body of their distant son.

The directorial concept underlying the construction of the performance structures the piece into three moving acts (Always Together; Borderland; Son), within which the narrative developments unfold through a layered dramaturgical process.

The performance, born from a fusion of theatre, dance and figure theatre, seeks to codify a hybrid language in which inanimate objects and human bodies can enter into dialogue, intertwining multiple relationships with the scenic space while simultaneously evoking different planes of reality.

Through these layers, the work channels the themes present in the writings of Ariel Dorfman, aiming to provoke a profound reflection on the present, on ourselves, and on our relationship with the contemporary world.