WOLKENHEIMAT_TRATTATO DELLA LONTANANZA

“In the experience of exile, the displacement of one’s gaze becomes a profound questioning; uprootedness seeks no protection outside language, which is often the only raft upon the sea of estrangement and solitude.”
Antonio Prete

Il Trattato della Lontananza (Treatise on Distance), a creation for three dancers, is a story of thresholds crossed, of borders and distances traversed. Here, distance becomes a frontier line, a place inhabited by solitude and by the difficulty of encountering and understanding the other. Today, distance is no longer remote, but close at hand — traversable, even domestic.

Il Trattato della Lontananza, conceived as a geography of the inner self, is the awkward, clumsy and fragile attempt to seek the other, to attract their attention, in order not to feel lost and isolated, because the need for the other is primordial. Yet truly meeting one another is difficult, just as it is difficult to imagine the other as a refuge, a savior, someone capable of welcoming us without reservation.

The constant encounters and clashes between the performers reveal the inability — shaped by pride, fear and insecurity — to offer ourselves honestly to another person; the risk is becoming a poor imitation of ourselves.

We share a home, a bed, children, work, public transport, restaurant tables, crowded beaches, offices… we are so close, and yet so far apart.
(E. Sciannamea)