A GENESIS

Inspired by Os Pobres, the harsh and painful novel by the Portuguese writer and historian Raul Brandão, Elegìa delle cose perdute is a layered choreographic project that engaged Zerogrammi over the course of three years of artistic research within the residency program Artisti nei territori / Interconnessioni in Sardinia.

Throughout the articulated creative trajectory that led to the work, the company — following a working method refined over the years — investigated territories, contexts and languages, collecting a living archive of materials and testimonies that nourished the dancing body with signs and inspirations originating not only from choreography itself, but also from other vocabularies (visual arts, video, photography, literature) and from an experience of the world grounded in relationships with places and people beyond the conventional spaces of theatre.

From this process emerged four interconnected forms: an award-winning medium-length film, a stage work, a photographic book enriched by an unpublished text by Eugenio Barba, and finally a community project that, accompanying the presentation of the performance, continues and multiplies the dialogue with ever-new territories and communities.

SYNOPSIS

“Blessed be the instants and the millimetres and the shadows of small things.”
— Fernando Pessoa

This is the tragicomic story of a family of souls: poor, derelict, the humus of the world (R. Brandão).

Worn clothes in earthy tones barely cover pale, waxen skin, so translucent that the last light of sunset seems to make it glow gold. Though different in the forms of exile to which they are subjected, their stories are united by the same sense of emptiness, generated by an inexorable absence and by a condition of profound misery inscribed within a present without resolution — one marked by a sadness both clownish and tender.

At times they are accompanied by the minor euphony of simple folk songs whispered toward the night sky, or by the melancholic progression of a nostalgic waltz.

What remains of their actions, of their futile efforts, becomes the narration of a feeling of lost things.

Among them lives, suspended at the threshold of this scenic space coloured like an old posting station, a poet named Gabirù. What for the others appears as a border without foothold — a cliff edge, a barrier, a conclusion — becomes for the poet the hyperbole of a here and now that is beginning, trespass, invitation to travel, crossing and metamorphosis.

From the threshold of the present, Gabirù’s words move his companions beyond the purgatory of oblivion and noise, into a poetic and silent time: no longer distant, but inhabitable and traversable.

A nostalgia for things that never existed, for a small homeland never truly lost — the place of an invented memory, a past, present and future imagined through the figures of this invention.

The poet’s words and dance trace the hyperbole toward the redemption of a promised land: a place one may journey toward without ever arriving, crossing through desire, through a somersault of thought, a spiral of the heart, a hedge-boundary reminiscent of Giacomo Leopardi, from which one may contemplate the disarming beauty of the infinite.