IL RACCONTO DELL'ISOLA SCONOSCIUTA

“If you do not step outside yourself, you cannot know who you are.”
— José Saramago

SYNOPSIS

The Tale of the Unknown Island is the story of a departure — one of those departures for a journey that knows only where it begins, but neither its destination nor its reason, except for the necessity of change and discovery.

And like every departure, every threshold, every liminal space and moment, it calls for the sacrifice of what we once called home: its certainties, habits and familiar landscapes that once offered us a fragile sense of reassurance.

But from the instant one becomes willing to leave something behind, to abdicate one’s roots, the emptiness created by that departure suddenly offers life new mobile roots, new possibilities and new questions.

To depart is an act of courage and surrender, a step toward the unknown carrying within it the lightness of dream. It means abandoning certainty in order to pursue possibility; it is an act of faith — in time, in change, in what is not yet known.

Yet perhaps departure is less an escape or an arrival than a way of rediscovering oneself, of understanding that the true tension lies not in a place, but in the transformation slowly taking shape within us.

CONTEXT

The choreographic project The Tale of the Unknown Island, freely inspired by the work of José Saramago, forms part of a broader artistic investigation into time, its passing, and the emotional and social conditions generated by our relationship with it.

Following the path opened by the previous creation Elegìa delle cose perdute — whose choreographic tableaux explored the human relationship with the past, with what has been abandoned, lost and left behind, reflecting on themes such as memory, nostalgia, belonging and exile — this new creation focuses its inquiry on our relationship with future time: on the suspended and uncertain present condition that carries our experiences toward desires and hopes still waiting to be realized.

This perception of time and its passage is deeply rooted in our nature as narrative beings, naturally inclined to tell and listen to stories in which we may recognize ourselves — stories whose roots lie in past experience and which return to life in the present, telling us who we are and of what we are part, guiding us through the flow of time.

The force that moves us multiplies around us meanings and reasons for one sole purpose: to bring the sense of existence into focus.

At the heart of this lies the question of all questions — the mysterious place from which philosophy and human thought have departed and to which they have returned since the beginning of time: Who am I?

Within the persistence of this question lives the hunger to name all things, to know them and thereby know oneself: the logos necessary for defining identity.

Yet even this is not enough, because each of us exceeds every definition. We are always something more: another self, a contradiction, a transformation, an unknown place still waiting to be discovered — descriptions of descriptions.

For this reason, every answer will always remain insufficient, and the journey in search of oneself will remain endless, painful and unresolved.

What we are resides within the question itself: it is neither fixed nor certain. It is the one, the nobody and the hundred thousand; it is the sum of the millimetres of the journey, a depth dwelling beneath the soles of our feet.

And yet life is nothing but an eternal present, and existence belongs entirely to the instant: the Goethean Augenblick, suspended in a thirsty search for meaning, within a liquid space that stretches like a surface as far as the eye can see, floating above the submerged past beneath the sea of time.

“When one lives, one lives and does not see oneself.”
— Luigi Pirandello

A man asks the king for a boat in order to search for an unknown island. His request granted, he departs — or perhaps dreams of departing — upon a poetic and dreamlike journey filled with symbols and metaphors.

The journey imagined or undertaken by the man becomes a search for himself, for the awareness of what he is willing to leave behind in the harbour in order to set sail freely.

It is a journey of growth, like those experienced by the protagonists of every fairy tale, requiring the most courageous and frightening act of faith of all: abandoning certainty in order to embrace the unknown, the question, the mystery and enchantment.

Through the metaphor of the sea voyage, he will traverse his own depths, uncovering words he did not know he possessed, embracing fragility as the most distinctive part of himself, and realizing that he himself is the mysterious island he seeks — the question, the eternally unknown and unplaceable territory, because it belongs to perpetual transformation.

A journey that forgets its departure, and a departure longing for return toward — or from — an invisible beyond-island that becomes tangible and reachable only in its imagining: tension toward discovery, cradle of memory, crucible of departures and returns, identity.