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 journeys that knows only where it begins, but not its destination nor its reason, other than change and discovery. Like every departure, it is a threshold, a liminal space and moment, calling for the sacrifice of what we once called home: its certainties, habits, and familiar landscapes that offered a fragile sense of calm.

Yet, from the instant one is willing to leave something behind, to abdicate one’s roots, the void generated by that leaving suddenly delivers new, mobile roots—possibilities and questions entrusted to life. To depart is an act of courage and abandonment, a step toward the unknown that carries the lightness of a dream. It is the choice to relinquish certainties in order to pursue possibilities; an act of faith—in time, in change, in what is still unknown.

Perhaps, more than a flight or an arrival, departure is a way of finding oneself: discovering that the true destination is not a place, but the transformation that slowly takes shape within us.

CONTEXT

The choreographic project The Tale of the Unknown Island, freely inspired by José Saramago’s homonymous work, belongs to a broader artistic research centred on time—its passage and the emotional and social conditions that this relationship generates.

Following Elegy of Lost Things—whose choreographic frames explore the human relationship with past time, with what has been abandoned, lost, or left behind, reflecting on memory, nostalgia, belonging, and exile—this new creation focuses its inquiry on future time and on the suspended, uncertain present that carries our experiences toward desires and hopes yet to be realised.

This relationship with time, and our distinctly human perception of its flow, is rooted in our nature as narrative beings: we are predisposed to tell and listen to stories in which we may recognise ourselves. These stories draw from past experience and return to life in the present, telling us who we are and what we belong to, guiding us through the passing of time. Embedded within them lies the question of all questions—the mysterious place of departures and returns in philosophy and human thought since time immemorial: Who am I?

In the persistence of this question lies the hunger to name all things—in order to know them, and to know ourselves, to distinguish and define identity through language. Yet this is still not enough, because each of us exceeds any definition: we are always more—another, a change, a contradiction, an unknown territory still to be discovered. Descriptions of descriptions. For this reason, every answer remains insufficient, and the journey in search of oneself is endless, restless, unresolved.

What we are exists within the question itself: it is neither given nor certain. It is one, no one, one hundred thousand. It is the sum of the millimetres of the journey, a depth that lies beneath the soles of our feet. And yet life is nothing but an eternal present, and existence belongs to the instant—the Goethean Augenblick—in a thirsty search for meaning, within a liquid space that is surface and horizon, floating above the past submerged 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 to search for an unknown island. His request granted, he departs—or dreams of departing—on a poetic and oneiric journey, rich in symbols and metaphors. Whether dreamed or undertaken, this journey leads him toward self-discovery, toward an 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 undertaken by the protagonists of every fairy tale, demanding the most courageous and frightening act of faith: abandoning certainty to embrace the unknown, the question, mystery, and wonder. Through the metaphor of the sea voyage, he crosses his own depths, awakening and revealing words he did not know he possessed, embracing fragility as the most distinctive part of himself.

He realises that he himself is the mysterious island he seeks: the question, the eternally unknown and unplaceable place, because it belongs to perpetual change. A journey that forgets its departure, and a departure that longs for return—from or toward an unknown island beyond. Invisible, yet becoming concrete and reachable only through its imagination: a tension toward discovery, a cradle of memory, a crucible of departures and returns—identity.