(...) Stefano Mazzotta brings to the stage a work of pure poetry, released through a destitute, exiled community—bearers of restlessness, desires, aspirations, a search for and attachment to their roots, abandonment and hope. Giuseppe Distefano | Cittanuova

Elegy of Lost Things embodies a poetics attentive to the reality around us. Enriched by the stories of “The Poor”—men pervaded by absence and desire—from Portuguese writer Raul Brandão’s novel, the work also becomes strikingly contemporary, offering an indirect and compelling glimpse into today’s deprivation and hope. Daria Chiappe | Danzasi

Through somersaults of thought, through symbolisms sometimes soft and sometimes as harsh as worn shoe soles beneath one’s teeth, Elegy of Lost Things stitches onto the audience’s skin the friendships, loves, resentments, deaths and lives of these mismatched, incomplete simulacra of humanity. Francesco Chiaro | Persinsala

An intense, evocative atmosphere, with bodies in dialogue with one another and with the audience. A story unfolding among characters struggling against an adverse fate, yet united by their shared existential adventure. Sandro Allegrini | Perugiatoday

(...) With great poetry, Elegy of Lost Things restores to us the soul of Brandão’s book: the rural poor, the ordinary people. Yet it also reminds us where we come from—of the poor, agricultural reality from which this country has emerged, now arrogant in its sense of being wealthy, civilised and victorious, even when corroded by misery; entirely uprooted because it can no longer remember what it fought for or from which ashes it rose. Enrico Pastore | Il Pickwick

They move forward solemnly, calmly and respectfully, drawn by the desire to no longer be alone. Delicate movements, almost fragile in their tenderness, give rise to scenes that break apart and come back together to the rhythm of music and soundscapes evoking an authentic, raw past. Letizia Mologni | Albanoarte Teatro

GENESIS

Inspired by Os Pobres, the stark and painful novel by Portuguese writer and historian Raul Brandão, Elegy of Lost Things is a multifaceted choreographic project developed by Zerogrammi over a three-year artistic process in Sardinia, as a guest of the residency programme Artists in the Territories / Interconnections.

Throughout the complex creative journey that led to the work, the company followed a working method refined over many years: investigating territories, contexts and diverse languages, while building a living archive of materials and testimonies. This archive nourished the dancing body with signs and inspirations drawn not only from dance, but also from other vocabularies—visual arts, video, photography and literature—and from an experience of the world grounded in a relationship with places and people beyond conventional theatre settings.

The project has generated four distinct yet interconnected forms: an award-winning medium-length film, a stage performance, a photographic book featuring an original text by Eugenio Barba, and finally a community project which, accompanying the presentation of the performance, continues and expands its 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, destitute, the humus of the world (R. Brandão). Worn clothes in earth tones barely cover their bruised, waxen skin, so pale that the last light of sunset seems to make it gleam with gold.

Though their stories differ in the forms of exile to which they are subjected, they are united by the same sense of emptiness, generated by an inescapable absence and by the circumstance of abject poverty. This is inscribed in an unbroken present, marked by a tender, clown-like sadness. From time to time, they are accompanied by the gentle minor-key euphony of simple folk songs whispered to the night sky, or by the melancholy progress of a nostalgic waltz.

What remains of their actions, of their futile efforts, is the story of a feeling for lost things. Among them lives Gabirù, a poet suspended on the threshold of this stage space, whose colours recall a wayside station. For the others, everything is a boundary without foothold: a cliff, an embankment, fulfilment, conclusion. For the poet, it is instead the hyperbole of a here and now that becomes beginning, trespass, an invitation to journey, crossing and metamorphosis.

From the threshold of the present, Gabirù’s words will lead his fellow performers 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 were; for a small homeland never lost; the place of an invented memory, a past, a present and a future conceived through the figures of this invention.

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