MAPPUGGHJE

“My eyes that loved you so much.”
— Luigi Tenco

In the Salento dialect, mappugghje are trinkets, odds and ends — the little things that accumulate inside wallets, drawers and tin boxes, objects preserved despite their lack of material value. To them we entrust fragments of heart, journeys and memories, asking them to safeguard these traces until the day we are finally ready to place them away in the attic.

It is within this waiting that a singular Penelope — the protagonist of this story told through body and voice — exists in the stillness of a small house.

For an immeasurable length of time, and with devotion, she waits.

In silence she moves among the mappugghje of her heart, attempting to recover their thread, inexorably destined to dissolve like sugar inside yet another cup of coffee.

Being herself the “weaving” without which Ulysses would be nothing more than a desperate hero wandering without destination, she recounts to us — with the same absence of chronological order found in Molly Bloom — her vision as a seated and patient woman, her endless packing and unpacking of suitcases, the symbolic journey she undertakes while pursuing and learning the magic contained within “small” everyday life.

Through an inner nomadism composed of solitary attentiveness to herself and to the domestic, earthly and reassuring world surrounding her, she experiments with her own being — because whoever waits eventually finds, while non-waiting guarantees only non-discovery.

Through the repetition of gestures and the consolidation of habits, her staying nourishes the inner time of knowledge, nourishes her soul and her capacity for listening.

Meanwhile, the mappugghje are preserved, accumulated and replaced, in an overlapping pursuit of temporalities where even the stage itself transforms and reorganizes according to a waiting that at times appears futile, at times nostalgic, and sometimes even self-satisfied.

And yet it remains unpredictable, dynamic and reflective: a wandering the protagonist presents to us as that of “a Ulysses without Ithaca,” surrendered to the inexhaustible flow of days like a glass into which water is endlessly poured yet never filled.

This, then, is the chronicle of an immobile journey: a condition of tension, of at/tention, of at/waiting.

A dimension of the human noùs that replaces “feminine” hospitality and understanding with “masculine” intrusion and conquest. A remaining firmly rooted to the earth, like the olive trunk upon which Ulysses nailed his marital bed.

It is an observation of that tiny portion of world extending no farther than the horizon of one’s gaze — and within it, the sound of the silence preceding a long-awaited return; and within that silence, the gentle noise of the tide and the wind, of lungs filling with air and blood flowing through veins, of living wood creaking softly: sounds accessible only to those who possess the time to wait.

This work, the result of two years of research articulated through choreographic residencies between Italy and Portugal, brings together on stage two different languages in dialogue: dance and prose. It inhabits an undefinable territory — neither dance nor theatre, yet both languages stitched together into two parallel and “incidentally” connected narratives.

Its narrative structure responds to the dramaturgical choice of a non-linear space-time, of a chronological disorder that replaces the logic and direction of Ulysses’ sea voyage with the complex and rich inner wandering of the waiting bride.

Thus the woman appears on stage simultaneously as the young Penelope at the dawn of a solitary waiting yet to unfold — embodied by the dancer Chiara Michelini — and as the elderly woman who has waited indefinitely and who, not always lucid, sometimes forgets the very object of this persistent waiting.

Through the voice of the actress Maria Cristina Valentini, she becomes ready to share with us her passionate, loving and at times disillusioned travel diary.

— Stefano Mazzotta