Caravaggio howls at the moon; the wolf is cut by the same light. Hands that tell, at once, the story of thought and the evolution of paw and claw. And that vein, that tension of faces and mortal, tangible life, held there on the canvas by Merisi’s visions.Bruno de Franceschi

Luci di carni (Lights of Flesh) is a work for five performers, born from suggestions drawn from the work of Michelangelo Merisi, universally known as Caravaggio.

Light. Shadow. And light again—light even within shadow—revealed through the volume of bodies, their intensity and their tangible reality.

Light in the history of forgotten, ordinary bodies, now brought to the foreground exactly as they are.

Light and flesh, precisely.

Caravaggio begins his revolution in stillness and meditation. In his work, he draws the viewer close, placing his subjects in “no place”. Out of nothingness, the extreme immediacy of what is depicted leaps into the foreground. At times, they seem to emerge from the darkness of the stage.

The bodies “are”, then fade, only to appear again in all their physical presence, in a play of volumes: bare bodies, germinal flavours, cutting and swaying, searching in the intoxicated air for the capture of their own shameless nakedness—moments radiating risk and absence.

From an unbroken, dense movement, dualities surface and emerge: animality and technique, ephemerality and seduction, light and shadow. Beauty, language. Merisi’s hands upon the canvas: the body/hand, the verse.

Those hands: I want to draw them out from there.

As vivid and full of life as the protagonists of Caravaggio’s paintings appear to our eyes, so mysterious and obscure remain for us the theatres of his personality.