If you do not step outside yourself, you cannot know who you are

José Saramago

(...) Every action in the performance is the result of a refined choreographic design, charged with profound meanings yet always marked by lightness. Francesca Maria Rizzotti | KLP

(...) The tension of a muscle, the fracture of a movement, its coming apart and recomposing, tell us something beyond the themes presented: what emerges is each dancer’s individual way of being, which does not stop at executing a step but passes through it and offers it anew with the intimacy of their inner impulses. Chiara Ceresola | Teatro DAMS Torino

SYNOPSIS

The Tale of the Unknown Island is the story of a departure: one of those journeys that knows only where it begins, but has no destination or reason other than change and discovery. Like every departure, threshold, liminal space and moment, it calls for the sacrifice of what we once called home—its certainties, habits and familiar landscapes that gave us a vague sense of reassurance.

Yet from the moment we are willing to leave something behind, to relinquish our roots, the emptiness created by that departure suddenly offers life new, mobile roots, new possibilities and questions. To depart is an act of courage and surrender; a step into the unknown that carries the lightness of a dream. It is leaving certainties behind in pursuit of possibility, an act of faith: in time, in change, in what is not yet known. But perhaps, more than an escape or an arrival, it is a way of finding ourselves again, of discovering that the true impetus is not a place, but the transformation that makes its way within us.

CONTEXT

The choreographic project The Tale of the Unknown Island, freely inspired by the work of the same title by José Saramago, forms part of a broader artistic exploration of time, its passing, and the emotional and social conditions generated by our relationship with it.

Following the earlier Elegy of Lost Things—whose choreographic tableaux explore the human relationship with past time, with what has been abandoned, lost and left behind, reflecting on memory, nostalgia, belonging and exile—this creation focuses on our relationship with future time: on the present condition, suspended and uncertain, which carries our experiences towards desires and hopes still to be realised.

This relationship, this distinctly human perception of time and its passage, is part of our nature as narrative beings, naturally inclined to tell and listen to stories in which we may recognise ourselves. Such stories take root in past experience and come back to life in the present, telling us who we are and what we are part of, guiding us through time. The nature that moves us multiplies meanings and reasons around this relationship for the sole purpose of bringing a sense of living into focus. Rooted within it lies the question of all questions, the mysterious place from which philosophy and human thought have set out and returned since the dawn of time: who am I?

In the persistence of this question lies the hunger to name all things—to know them, to know ourselves and to distinguish ourselves: the logos indispensable to defining an identity. Yet this is still not enough, because each of us is always more than that definition: someone else, a change, a contradiction, an unknown place still and always to be discovered—descriptions of descriptions. The answer will therefore always be insufficient, and the journey in search of oneself unceasing, painful and unresolved.

What we are lies in the question: it is neither given nor certain; it is one, no one and one hundred thousand; it is the sum of the millimetres of the journey; it is a depth that dwells beneath the soles of our feet. Yet life is nothing but an eternal present, and existence belongs to the instant: Goethe’s Augenblick, in its thirsty search for the meaning of life, within a liquid space that is surface as far as the eye can see, floating and suspended above the past beneath us, submerged under the sea of time.

When one lives, one lives and does not see oneself.Luigi Pirandello

A man asks the king for a boat in order to seek an unknown island. His request granted, he sets out—or dreams of setting out—on a poetic, dreamlike journey rich in symbols and metaphors. The journey imagined or undertaken by the man becomes a journey towards himself, towards an awareness of what he is willing to leave behind in the harbour in order to set sail freely: a journey of growth, like those undertaken by the protagonists of every fairy tale, demanding the bravest and most frightening act of faith: to relinquish certainty and embrace the unknown—questioning, mystery and wonder.

Through the metaphor of a sea voyage, he will cross his own depths, setting in motion and revealing words he did not know he possessed. He will embrace his fragility as the most distinctive part of himself, realising that he himself is the mysterious island he seeks: the question, the eternally unknown and unplaceable place, because it belongs to perpetual change; a journey that forgets its departure, and a departure that longs to return towards—or from—an unknown, invisible island beyond, which becomes concrete and reachable only in its representation: the impulse towards discovery, the cradle of memory, the crucible of departures and returns, identity.