Premiere & co-production: ORIENTE OCCIDENTE FESTIVAL 2009Best Creation Award: APULIARTE FESTIVAL 2012

(...) In drag, in black petticoats with muscular male calves fully visible, veils on their heads, and cardboard handbags crammed with red candles and tempting flasks of wine, the two hilarious and utterly different performers take up the accessories of a sweetly innocent, never blasphemous irreverence. They dance energetically through genuflections, votive gestures and clasped hands, at times locked in a dramatic physical struggle. They finally arrive naked at the purified lightness of their Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum.* Marinella Guatterini, Il Sole 24 Ore

(...) Definitely one of this Singapore Festival’s top shows! Y. Sheng, The Flying Inkpot

(...) Two performers who reveal their elegance, harmony and irony to the audience in a work which, since 2008, has continued to enrich Italy’s stages. D. Jaccod, La Stampa

(...) Inri is a celebration—never disrespectful—of the power of belief. N. Koh, The Business Times

(...) Inri is a slice of life which, despite its stylisation and its essential, almost abstract use of symbols and key moments, places itself in the spectator’s hands in a surprisingly direct and complicit way. It relies not only on the expressive force of caricatured situations and figures, but also on the intrinsic truth each of them holds. A. Giuliani, Nucleo Artzine

It is a rosary made of almonds and sugar, walnuts and dried chestnuts, jute sacks and brass weights. It is a rosary to be prayed with the tongue, between tooth and tooth. Prayer rises and fulfils the need to encounter the liturgy of crooked words, which live and bounce off those walls like the cries of some animal, take your pick. The eyes take pleasure and reassurance alike in seeing the positions assumed by the red saints. A feeling of joy is stirred by their daring plaster-like stillness, beside which getting up and sitting down on uncomfortable pews is far more bearable. (F. Chiriatti)

The characters in this story, grotesque, paradoxical and improbable in colour yet truthful all the same, move across the stage along a temporal path that imitates a ramshackle liturgy. They speak of a religion with “southern” features: scented with mandarins on Nativity scenes, echoing with bolero in the squares after sacred processions; a religion of gentle old ladies armed with rosaries and still dressed in black, whose God, after the blessing at the appointed place, joins them among domestic things.

In their dancing of words and silence, there is a body-language put on display: a choreography of steps, at times painful, at times angelic, performed as a parody of the religious and everyday bigotry that belongs to our culture. There is a sacred and profane universe—cruel and tender, ironic and tragic—in this liturgy of gestures, crooked genuflections, uncomfortable postures and ungrammatical expressive masks exuding an innocent awkwardness.

It is found in the details of praying hands animated by dizzying, hypnotic turns reminiscent of Bausch; in the ecstatic freeze-frames of mouths and eyes; in the liturgies of legs and arms raised into a Crucifixion and a Baroque Deposition, echoing popular religious icons. There are village sounds and voices, processions of Madonnas, litanies and fragrant rosaries, and a heart-rending Agnus Dei to whose music the dance bewilders and enchants.

There is the sound of mystical stillness and the suspension of a prayerful miracle; the hysteria of contracted muscles and exposed backs; and finally, the two bodies subjected to undressings that reveal the emptiness of sterile religious practice. Through all of this, there is a sense of permanent, unfillable waiting: in that desolate land, yet inhabited by visions, of a soul in need of spirituality.

Giuseppe Distefano