SIMPOSIO DEL SILENZIO

“Dreams are the gateway into a fairytale world of anthropomorphic clouds making love, ogres and giantesses, fantastic animals, black rabbits and birds of prey.”
— Lorenzo Mattotti

In the complex journey that carries us from childhood into adulthood, adolescence is the transitional territory of unrest and transformation — the place where dreams and desires, emerging with childlike wonder from the lightness of childhood, project themselves toward the future while dialoguing with (and often colliding against) reality.

As fairy tales teach us, however, this is the necessary journey through which we come to understand who we are, above all through confronting our deepest fears.

Thus, Simposio del Silenzio unfolds as a tale suspended between dance, clowning and theatre: a fairytale journey into the dark world of the unconscious, whose landscapes are inspired by the illustrated works of Lorenzo Mattotti.

At the centre of the story lies the fragility and restlessness of a young protagonist and her awkward, questioning relationship with the large and heavy books scattered across the stage. As bearers of possible answers and possible paths, these objects — almost endowed with a life of their own — accompany her on a vertical journey of self-discovery that recalls the illogical worlds of Lewis Carroll’s Alice during her famous fall into the White Rabbit’s hole.

From this backward fall, images and movements follow one another, generating symbols of childhood anxiety through the murky landscapes of a narrative devoted to doubt, uncertainty and the precariousness of the self.

As in every coming-of-age fairy tale, the narrative repeatedly returns to the dynamics generated by questioning and by the desire for balance in the face of obstacles, trials to overcome, safe places and forms of order to be conquered.

Abandoning the presumed certainty of a fixed centre, the story launches itself into the precariousness of motion, into the search for a temporary refuge, for a plausible order, ultimately offering us the only possible certainty: that nothing ever remains the same, and that the condition of questioning is the only path toward growth, transformation and discovery.