Dance moves through the dark heart of Seneca’s Thyestes, retracing—through gestures, whispers, voids, and silences—its tragic power. The myth is distilled to its rawest essence: revenge, fratricidal gesture, flesh, the cannibal banquet, at whose centre stands an unquenchable thirst for power—a heart at war, a corrosive force that contaminates every affection and dissolves every bond. Dance becomes an act of domination and oppression; the body is deformed and consumed by it. Every movement is a wound, every pause a restrained scream. The bare, essential stage turns into the site of an inner and political struggle, where ambition and humiliation chase one another toward annihilation. Tragedy is not narrated: it is enacted. Dance gives body to a fractured, lacerated soul in which victim and executioner coexist, clash, and ultimately recognise one another.

The disintegration of identity, the struggle for recognition, the body as a site of conflict. Seneca’s work is an abyss: Thyestes is not merely the tale of an inhuman revenge, but a tragic device that exposes the most perverse nature of power. In this choreographic study, the ancient text becomes living matter for a physical, visceral, contemporary investigation into power as a destructive drive, and into its inevitable entanglement with abuse, manipulation, and humiliation. Atreus and Thyestes coexist and overlap within the same body, like two forces that collide, contaminate one another, and mutually destroy themselves on a stripped-down, almost sacrificial stage. Power is not represented but enacted: it reveals itself through muscular tension, obsessive repetition, the imposition of gesture, control and collapse. Abuse is not a narrated fact, but a choreographic dynamic. Movement becomes domination, silence turns into oppression, and the body transforms into a battlefield. References to myth do not seek reconstruction, but detonation—brothers who betray one another, children sacrificed, kingdoms built upon the ruin of intimacy. Dance passes through these themes as one passes through a wound: without illustration, without resolution, listening instead to the deep resonance of its protagonist, to its fury—still so close to our own.

With Thyestes, Zerogrammi inaugurates the Past Forward project: a process of rewriting that moves backward through the company’s artistic archive, re-drawing the urgencies that have shaped its creative trajectory over twenty-five years of activity.