Dream is the gateway to a fairy-tale world of anthropomorphic clouds making love, ogres and giantesses, fantastic animals, black rabbits, and birds of prey.
Lorenzo Mattotti

In the complex journey that carries us from childhood to adulthood, adolescence is a transitional terrain of restlessness and transformation—a place where dreams and desires, arriving with the enchantment of childhood lightness, are projected toward the future, entering into dialogue (and often collision) with reality. As fairy tales teach us, this is a necessary journey: the path through which we come to understand who we are, precisely by confronting our deepest fears.

So it is in Symposium of Silence: a narrative between dance, clowning, and theatre, conceived and constructed as a fairy-tale journey into the dark world of the unconscious, whose landscapes draw inspiration from the illustrated works of Lorenzo Mattotti. At the centre of the story lies the restlessness and fragility of a young protagonist and her awkward, questioning relationship with large, heavy books that populate the stage. Bearers of hypothetical answers and possible paths, these objects—almost endowed with a life of their own—accompany her on a vertical journey in search of herself, recalling the illogical scenarios of Carroll’s Alice during her famous fall down the rabbit hole.

From this backward fall, images and movements unfold, giving shape to symbols of childhood unease, through the murky landscapes of a narrative devoted to doubt, uncertainty, and the precariousness of the self.

As in every coming-of-age tale, the narration insists and returns to the dynamics generated by questioning and by the longing for balance when faced with obstacles, trials to be overcome, safe places to be found, and orders to be conquered. Abandoning the presumed certainty of a centre, the story plunges into the precariousness of motion, into the search for a temporary refuge and a plausible order, ultimately restoring the only certainty possible: that nothing ever remains the same, and that the condition of questioning is the only path toward growth, change, and discovery.