It is a rosary made of almonds and sugar, walnuts and dried chestnuts, burlap sacks and brass weights.

A rosary to be prayed with the tongue, caught between tooth and tooth.

Prayer rises and satisfies the need to surrender to the liturgy of broken words, which live and rebound against the walls like the cries of some animal, chosen at will. The eyes take pleasure and reassurance at once in contemplating the poses assumed by the red saints. A surge of joy springs from their immobility, carved in daring plaster—by comparison, the act of rising and sitting on uncomfortable pews seems far more bearable.

(F. Chiriatti)

The characters of this tale—grotesque, paradoxical, improbable yet profoundly truthful—move across the stage along a temporal path that mirrors a ramshackle liturgy. They speak of a religion marked by “southern” traits: scented with mandarins on nativity scenes, echoing with boleros in village squares after sacred processions; a religion of gentle elderly women clutching rosaries, still dressed in black, whose God, once the blessing is given in its appointed place, follows them back into the domestic sphere.

In their choreographing of words and silence, there emerges a bodily language placed on display: a choreography of steps—at times painful, at times angelic—played out through the parody of a religious and everyday bigotry deeply rooted in our culture. A sacred and profane universe unfolds—cruel and tender, ironic and tragic—within a liturgy of gestures, of crooked genuflections, uncomfortable postures, and ungrammatical expressive masks that exude an innocent clumsiness.

This universe lives in the details: hands clasped in prayer, animated by dizzying, hypnotic rotations reminiscent of Bausch; ecstatic freeze-frames of mouths and eyes; liturgies of legs and arms lifted into Crucifixion and baroque Depositions, evoking popular devotional icons. There are village sounds and voices, processions of Madonnas, litanies and scented rosaries, a heartrending Agnus Dei upon whose notes the dance intoxicates and enchants.

There is the sound of mystical stillness, the suspension of a prayed-for miracle; there is the hysteria of contracted muscles and exposed backs; and finally, the exposure and stripping of two bodies, revealing the emptiness of a sterile religious practice. Beneath it all lies a sense of perpetual, unfillable waiting—in that desolate land, yet one inhabited by visions—of a soul in need of spirituality.

(Giuseppe Distefano)