(...) Quite simply, it is the journey towards one’s aspirations, passions and beauty. This is how the two protagonists of Jentu keep trying, failing and starting again, never losing heart. They are modern-day Don Quixotes, contemporary anti-heroes pursuing their ideals as they travel together, side by side, encouraging one another. The success of Jentu lies in this poetic metaphor of the journey and of refusing to surrender to the world. (...) Maria Luisa Buzzi | DANZA&DANZA

(...) A story in stages, made up of powerful gestures and sweeping dancing steps, almost stretched and propelled like elastic from a window—a place of encounters and departures. The hidalgo is an anti-hero, fighting against worldly illusions, glories and power. In its rounded, fully realised form, Jentu is able to convey all of this with poetry. (...) Marinella Guatterini | IL SOLE 24 ORE

(...) The choreographies conceived by Stefano Mazzotta evoke a range of states of mind, offering themselves to the eyes and hearts of those who watch. Miriam Arensi | LA VOCE

(...) The fluid score of contact and lifts, of complicity and brotherhood—how rare it is to see a duet that does not evoke love between a man and a woman!—alternates with melancholic moments of suspension at the window: as though reality, impossible to ignore, always ended up calling the two heroes back to itself. And even if Chiara/Sancho never stops urging her knight on—“get up! run! fight!”—Stefano/Quixote, having hung up his coat, walks away. But beyond the stage, as we know, it is far more difficult to give form to dreams. Maddalena Giovannelli | STRATAGEMMI

All is usual. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. (S. Beckett)

JENTU is a work for two dancers inspired by Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Through a close reading of Cervantes’ work, the focus on the exploits of the protagonist and his travelling companions—from Sancho Panza to Dulcinea—has shifted towards the meaning these deeds may still hold for us today.

Actions without a happy ending, futile actions, played out in the half-light of a room. Actions capable of prefiguring a new ethics and a new model of hero: one without special powers, without glory or trumpet calls heralding his fragile humanity. Brighter colours are diluted into watercolours across the stage through choreographies, solos and duets, actions and silences permeated by a delicate mood.

With a light, elusive stroke, the work traces the figure of a fragile hero—an emblem of an ethics of failure—who renews the challenge of trying again, from the beginning, with courage. It speaks to us of the ability to accept a fall in order to pursue one’s deepest ideal, and finally to rediscover, in the striving towards our noblest desires, the wonder of the journey required to fulfil them.

Such are the characters of JENTU: exiled from a time to which they no longer belong, or from a place that has been taken away from them; suspended, foreign, they inhabit a Leopardi-like landscape whose threshold is surrender—the only possible place of belonging and meaning.