PLOT

“I am nothing. I will never be anything. I cannot wish to be anything. Aside from that, I carry within me all the dreams of the world.” Fernando Pessoa

A rugged and dusty Sardinia. A dance as rocky as the mountains, as bare as the dry branches of trees and the shrubs scorched by a blinding sun. Time wears away at architecture and empties villages. It scars the walls from which yellowed plaster crumbles away. It strips doors and window frames. Time is dust. It gathers inside abandoned houses. It settles upon objects, fossilizing them. Time is a stone in the hands of an old man, smoothed by the elements.

(...) The crackling of footsteps. The rustling of shoes against cobblestones. The dry impact of earth broken open by a shovel. The warm vibration of guitar strings. The enveloping friction of bows against violas and violins. A slow and painful dance. The dream of a madman. The delirium of a clown. The fragmented sorrow of a woman dressed in black.

Figures with mechanical movements and absent gazes, like the characters of Tadeusz Kantor, perpetually suspended between life and death. Crying. A silent nostalgia emerging through the body, through stiff choreographies made of spasms and syncopations.

The Nuragic landscape of Sardinia becomes a horizon of abandonment and desolation. In this land of forsaken souls, the camera remains still, delivering a photographic novel composed of tableaux. The color palette is muted. Long and very long shots stand out against a dramatic horizon, made even more unsettling by its contrast with the luminosity of this Mediterranean, rocky, prehistoric South.

The fixed, frontal gaze of the camera investigates colors while preserving their mystery. The sea at five in the morning. The violent wind of a scorched Ferragosto afternoon. These creatures belong to death. They sense their own decomposition, yet cannot rationalize it. They find no peace.

A feeling of exile permeates the choreographies of disconnected and unresolved characters, who discover an idea of proximity and community through contact with water — a synonym for drowning, an allegory of shipwreck, an invitation to crossing, a symbol of rebirth. The sea merges life and death into one. It initiates the resurrection of bodies as still as the shots themselves, after a final supper in which even food becomes a celebration of absence.

Ancient costumes and objects. Everything is fixed: pain, gazes, memories, dance. Lost and exiled women. Disjointed and disintegrated men. Everyone carries a mourning to process. They grieve for things, for people, for themselves. They are zombies in the half-light, celebrating their own funeral before digging their graves with their own hands.

Stefano Mazzotta — trained through the schools of Cantieri Teatrali Koreja and Paolo Grassi School of Dramatic Arts, and a multimedia artist closely connected to the “Third Theatre” tradition — intertwines dance, literature, photography and visual arts. He discovers the pharmakon within the wound itself.

The dancers metabolize their own death once they become conscious of it. They transcend it through a collective dimension capable of consoling pain. They shape a shared dance where magic and madness coexist. A shipwreck within an ancestral South. A journey recalling Miracle in Milan, but also the dreamlike madness of Train of Life.

Panoramic and human landscapes reminiscent of Isabel Allende. Faces marked by the erosion of life. Extreme close-ups and sweeping panoramas recalling Sergio Leone. The overused Waltz No. 2 by Dmitri Shostakovich initiates a jagged collective dance, made even more evocative when filmed from above — widened, never truly synchronized with the music. It is precisely through this unstable dynamism that the redemption of this rural and untamed South begins to emerge, resistant to tourist narratives and ready, like a phoenix, to rise again from its ashes.

A hymn to life that does not deny death. Elegy of Lost Things is a river of tears, cries and mystery. A cloudy wave exposing the deepest roots. The torrent carries misfortunes and laughter alike; relentlessly it drags this human land toward a shore where the worn hands of those who have suffered finally find another hand to hold them. Where the eyes of the poor, exhausted from crying, awaken before an eternal dawn — where dreams become reality.

(from a review by Vincenzo Sardelli for KLP)

A GENESIS

Inspired by Os Pobres (The Poor), the harsh and painful novel by Portuguese writer and historian Raul Brandão, Elegy of Lost Things is an articulated choreographic project that engaged the company Zerogrammi over a three-year artistic process hosted in Sardinia within the residency program Artisti nei territori / Interconnessioni.

Throughout the complex creative trajectory that led to the work, the company — following a working method consolidated 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 drawn not only from choreographic vocabularies but also from other artistic fields such as visual arts, video, photography and literature, as well as from an experience of the world grounded in relationships with places and people outside conventional theatrical frameworks.

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

REFERENCES

Within an overwhelmingly dark world, shaped by resignation and hardship, unresolved existential questions and extreme deprivation, the characters of Brandão’s novel — imprisoned within the blackest misery as though life itself were a prison — stage a slow procession of bitter reflections from which emerges a universal law governing humanity’s fragile passage: the living have no other destiny than to die and eventually become humus, nourishment for worms and for the Earth which, despite everything, continues to turn.

Written in Portugal at the beginning of the twentieth century — a nation confronting the inevitable collapse of its colonial project, the consequences of growing internal impoverishment, and the disintegration of the promises of modern urbanization — The Poor is a harsh and painful novel that leaves no room for sentimentality or redemption. Human beings are condemned, especially the poor and destitute; they inhabit darkness both external — beneath a sky heavy as a lid — and internal, within the depths of each soul.

“Let life follow its splendid course. It tastes of dream and iron. It is tenderness, disgrace, despair. It takes hold of us, drags us along, pushes us forward, fills us with illusion, scatters us across every corner of the globe. It bruises us. Lifts us up. Dazes us. Protects us. Soaks us together in the same vortex of mud. Kills us. And yet, even if only for a moment, it forces us to look upward, and until the end we remain there, our eyes astonished.”

— Raul Brandão