COMMOSSE GEOGRAFIE // CAPITOLO#1 TERRACARNE

“The world of women’s literature opens before our eyes: imagination, in observing the exquisiteness of the gesture — precise and individual, restrained yet never emphatic — becomes instrumental in constructing the choreographic flow.

We may read within it the stories of the protagonists of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, or the force of The House of Bernarda Alba, with its tyrannical mother figure in the masterpiece by Federico García Lorca, but also certain atmospheres belonging to the cinema of Pedro Almodóvar.

We perceive this through the gesturality of the hands moving in a form of dance that recalls ancient ritualities. Hands that caress, cradle and heal; hands that pray and support in the name of sisterhood; or hands to be read as ancient fortune tellers once did, leading us back toward the archaic matriarchy of Southern Italy.

And this is not only because we discover that the work draws inspiration from La restanza, the remarkable essay by the anthropologist Vito Teti, but above all because it is built upon the return of the body — a body revisiting certain inner landscapes and rediscovering the remnants of filtered and sedimented memories.

The choreographic cohesion developed by Stefano Mazzotta focuses precisely upon these restanze: traces of shared movements and gazes. Mazzotta invites us to revisit and retrace them through the body, as when a gesture originating from the hip spreads contagiously among all the performers in a choral movement propagating through space and unfolding into individual stories.

Commosse geografie offers to the gaze stories of abandonment, solitude, rejection and absence; stories about the need to narrate oneself and rediscover oneself despite a time that has altered faces, dreams and hopes, but not the desire to remain together.

The breadcrumbs scattered at the end of the performance — symbols of primary and pure nourishment — become the sign of a path never to be lost: the road home, where beauty may once again be found through togetherness.”

— Cristina Squartecchia | PAC