ELEGIA + A FUTURA MEMORIA

THE PROJECT

A FUTURA MEMORIA is an ensemble performance staged in unconventional spaces, a transcultural, intergenerational project open to many participants, the setting for open dialogue on themes such as identity and belonging, memory and relations, that are explored, shared, developed through movement and dance.

The project was conceived within Elegia delle cose perdute (Elegy of lost things), a movie and a live performance produced by Zerogrammi dance troupe under the direction of its choreographer Stefano Mazzotta, inspired by the book Os Pobres by Portuguese historian and writer Raul Brandao. But, as for this creation, the project accompanies all the company’s choreographic productions becoming, in the relationship with different communities and territories, a tool for reflection around common themes that decline in themselves the concepts of identity, roots, memory, belonging and future.

The nature of the themes that the company’s creations mature in their development trajectory, both in the relationship with the contents of the numerous literary references and in the articulation of a creative process that leads the process to deal with social and community contexts, gives rise and forms an experiential path capable of soliciting reflections and positive responses around the feeling of cohesion and belonging.

The use of movement as a tool of inquiry, as a space for personal expression and interpersonal relations, acts as the medium for a culture of closeness, of proximity. An investment on people’s quality of life, a way to support and promote territories, cultures, peculiarities, to foster awareness of identity and rights: personal, civil, social rights. Our physical, emotional body is a living archive of experience.

The project aims to offer communities a new way to narrate themselves, through collaborative processes that are open to others.

Every human body is a diary, an archive of memories, each contributing to what we are, to the way we move and communicate. We can learn to read through these “ways”, to dance on them, letting them spell out the rich vocabulary of our story.

CONTACTING COMMUNITIES

Zerogrammi’s artistic and cultural projects are developed within its wider, permanent coworking project of choreography design. Around the production of live performances, a whole network exists: an international, multidisciplinary network where artists and audiences come into contact, with a program that includes the creation of contemporary performances, training and artistic research, experimentation; a network that encourages inclusion and exchange, that brings together experience, talent, and best practices. This fertile ground gives life to projects that traverse different languages and environments; it nurtures a cultural production that mobilizes the wealth of knowledge and talent that the territory has to offer, with a particular focus on coaching new generations of artists and

audience, while at the same time working in synergy with the area’s wider cultural and touristic offer. At the root of each project are reciprocity, open exchange, receptiveness to social issues, with the aim of turning creative work into a tool in the hands of the community, of having it transcend its purely artistic goal and acquire a social, educational value.

Among the activities that run parallel to the creative process, in the complex route that leads to the development of each creation, many actions take the company’s artistic work out of the usual environment and towards people. Creation is a journey that craves the knowledge of different spaces and cultures, to make it the main building tool of its dramaturgy.

We always welcome the opportunity to set aside for a moment our own cultural, social identity, to experience that feeling of loss and vertigo that comes before discovery and the encounter of the other. And it is here where the tools employed in crossing new regions become the precious chance for new questions, new stimuli, both as people and as

artists, the ground for genuinely sharing with people and places we come across, to bring into existence and multiply a local, national, international network as the keystone to the self-sustained growth of a territory, to giving value to all its potential. The aim of involving a whole territory, outside the purely artistic context, is to initiate a process of sharing personal experiences, experiences from the social milieu of reference, through dialogue mediated by art and the specific themes of the creations currently under development, dialogue on the themes of belonging, on defining a fluid socio-cultural identity, on the meaning and value of theatre as a place of individual and collective growth.