The world of women’s literature unfolds before our eyes. Imagination, through the observation of gesture in all its precision and individuality—restrained yet never emphatic—serves the construction of the choreographic flow. We may read the stories of the protagonists of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, or the power of the domineering mother in Federico García Lorca’s masterpiece The House of Bernarda Alba; we may also recognise certain atmospheres from Pedro Almodóvar’s cinema.

It can be seen in the gestures of the hands, moving in a kind of dance that recalls ancient rituals: hands that caress, cradle and care for; hands that pray and offer support as a sign of sisterhood; or hands to be read, as the ancient fortune-tellers once did, returning us to the archaic matriarchy of Southern Italy. This is not only because the work draws inspiration from La restanza, the compelling essay by anthropologist Vito Teti, but above all because it is built on the body’s return: revisiting certain inner landscapes, recovering the remnants of memories that have been filtered and sedimented.

The choreographic work of cohesion developed by Stefano Mazzotta centres precisely on these remnants—of shared movements and gazes. Mazzotta invites the performers to revisit and re-cross them through the body, as when a gesture that springs from the hip spreads to all the women in a shared movement, propagating through space and releasing dynamics that arrive at individual stories.

Commosse geografie entrusts the gaze with stories of abandonment, solitude, rejection and absence; stories of the need to tell oneself and to rediscover oneself despite a time that has altered faces, dreams and hopes, but not the desire to be together. The breadcrumbs scattered at the end of the performance—symbols of primary, pure nourishment—mark a path never to be lost: the road home, where the beauty of union may be rediscovered.* Cristina Squartecchia | PAC

TERRACARNE is an initial study resulting from two weeks of creative residency at Dance Gallery in Perugia, and the first phase of the broader choreographic project COMMOSSE GEOGRAFIE.

Led by choreographer Stefano Mazzotta, this first chapter of research features six dancers who passed through the training and residency spaces directed by Valentina Romito and Rita Petrone at the beginning of their thirty years of activity in dance: Amina Amici, Cecilia Ventriglia, Chiara Michelini, Daria Menichetti, Eleonora Chiocchini and Sara Orselli.

The project COMMOSSE GEOGRAFIE focuses its narrative intent on themes of time, memory and the relationship between body, remembrance and landscape, taking inspiration from philosophical and poetic works such as Lionello Sozzi’s Gli spazi dell’anima (The Spaces of the Soul) and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

In this first stage work, the choreographic research focused on the word “rootedness”: what dynamics are set in motion within the apparent stillness of waiting and remaining? What kinds—and how many—transformations pass through us, shaping and altering both inner and outer landscapes? Within this spatial dichotomy, the body, in its forms, holds and archives within itself—in its fullness and emptiness—the memories and experiences of passing time.

Dance becomes geography: it grounds its presence in the space and time of memory, multiplies its directions, and questions its environment, revealing the illusion of time’s linearity and of the subject’s dominance over events. From this immersive process, a delicate and unprecedented world emerges—each time reinvented, relived—a world rising again from silence and inner invisibility.