Dance moves through the dark heart of Seneca’s Thyestes, retracing—through gestures, whispers, voids, and silences—its tragic power. This is myth distilled to its rawest essence: vengeance, fratricidal act, flesh, cannibal banquet, with the thirst for power at its core—a heart at war, a corrosive force that taints every affection and dissolves every bond. Dance becomes an act of domination and violence, the body is deformed and consumed by it. Every movement is a wound, every pause a stifled scream. The stage, bare and essential, becomes the site of an inner and political struggle, where ambition and humiliation chase each other to the point of annihilation.

Tragedy is not told: it is fulfilled. Dance gives form to a split, lacerated soul, where victim and executioner coexist, battle one another, and ultimately recognize each other.

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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 story of 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 exploration of power as a destructive drive, and of its inescapable entanglement with abuse, manipulation, and humiliation.
Atreus and Thyestes coexist and overlap within the same body, like two forces clashing, contaminating each other, destroying one another in a stripped-down, almost sacrificial scene. Power, not represented but enacted, is revealed in muscular tension, obsessive repetition, imposed gesture, control and collapse. Abuse is not narrated—it is a choreographic dynamic. Movement becomes domination, silence becomes oppression, the body becomes a battlefield. The myth is not reconstructed, but its core is detonated: brothers betraying each other, children sacrificed, kingdoms built on the ruins of intimacy.

Dance moves through these themes as one crosses a wound: without illustrating, without seeking resolution, listening instead to the deep noise of its protagonist—his fury—still so close to our own.

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The creation Thyestes inaugurates Past Forward, a new project by Zerogrammi: a process of rewriting that moves backward through the company’s artistic archive, redefining the urgencies that have shaped its creative path over 25 years of activity.