INRI

“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 satisfies the need to move toward the liturgy of broken-down words, words that live and bounce from those walls like the cries of some chosen animal. The eyes delight in and reassure themselves at the same time in observing the poses assumed by the red saints. There is a movement of joy in the stillness of their daring plaster forms, beside which even the repeated rising and sitting on uncomfortable pews becomes far more bearable.”
— Fabio Chiriatti

The characters inhabiting this story — grotesque, paradoxical and improbable despite their truthfulness — move across the stage through a temporal path that imitates a ramshackle liturgy.

They speak of a religion marked by distinctly “southern” tones: a religion scented with mandarins on nativity scenes, resonating with boleros in town squares after sacred processions; a religion of docile old women armed with rosaries and still clothed in black, whose God, after the formal blessing in the appointed place, follows them home among domestic things.

Within their choreography of words and silences lives a bodily language placed on display: a dance of steps, now sorrowful, now angelic, performed through the parody of a religious and everyday bigotry deeply rooted in our culture.

There exists within it a sacred and profane universe — cruel and tender, ironic and tragic — articulated through liturgies of gestures, crooked genuflections, uncomfortable postures and ungrammatical expressive masks sweating innocent awkwardness.

In the details of praying hands animated by dizzying, hypnotic whirlings reminiscent of Pina Bausch; in ecstatic freeze-frames of mouths and eyes; in liturgies of legs and arms transformed into Crucifixions and baroque Depositions recalling popular iconography.

There are the sounds and voices of villages, of Marian processions, of litanies and fragrant rosaries, of a heartbreaking Agnus Dei upon whose notes the dance intoxicates and enchants.

There is the sound of mystical stillness and the suspension of the longed-for miracle; there is the hysteria of contracted muscles and exposed backs, and finally of two bodies laid bare, revealing the emptiness of a sterile religious practice.

And within all of this, there remains above all a sense of perpetual and unfillable waiting — within that desolate yet vision-filled land of a soul still yearning for spirituality.

— Giuseppe Distefano