(...) Dance, theatre and mime are bound together like mortar. The music is mournful, yet Penelope reveals a cartoon-like physicality: nervous tics, hysterical actions, a hand sliding down the knee and drawing the body after it. K. Gomes, Público

(...) Retro music, choreographies of “crooked” movements, and moments of true poetry. F. Audisio, KLP

My eyes, which loved you so much.Luigi Tenco

In the Salento dialect, mappugghje are knick-knacks and bric-a-brac: the things that accumulate in wallets, drawers and tin boxes, kept despite their scant material value. We entrust them with little pieces of our hearts, journeys and memories, asking them to safeguard these fragments until we are ready to put them away in the attic.

Such is the waiting lived by a singular Penelope, the character of this story told through body and voice, in the stillness of a small house. For time immemorial, she has waited with devotion. In silence, she moves among the mappugghje of her heart, trying to recover their thread—a thread inexorably destined to dissolve like sugar in yet another cup of coffee.

A fabric herself, a “weave” without which her husband Ulysses would be nothing more than a desperate hero wandering without destination, she recounts—through the same lack of chronological order as Molly Bloom—her own vision of a seated, patient woman; her packing and unpacking of suitcases; the symbolic journey she undertakes as she pursues and learns the magic contained in “small” everyday life. This is an inner nomadism: a solitary and attentive listening to herself and to the familiar, earthly, safe world around her.

In waiting, she experiences herself—for whoever waits finds, while not waiting guarantees only non-discovery. In the repetition of gestures, in the strengthening of habits, her being there nourishes the inner time of knowledge: it nourishes her soul and her capacity to listen. Meanwhile, the mappugghje are kept, accumulated and replaced, in a succession of overlapping times in which the stage too transforms and arranges itself around a waiting that at times seems futile, at times nostalgic, at others even self-satisfied.

Yet this waiting is unpredictable, dynamic and reflective: a “wandering” through which the protagonist appears to us as “a Ulysses without Ithaca”, surrendered to the inexhaustible flow of days, like a glass into which we pour water and which, despite everything, is never full.

This, then, is the chronicle of an unmoving journey: a state of tension, of at/tention, of ex/pectation. A dimension of the human nous that substitutes a “feminine” receptiveness and understanding for a “masculine” intrusion and conquest. It is a state of being firmly bound to the earth, like the olive trunk on which Ulysses built his marriage bed.

It is an observation of a tiny portion of the world, one that does not extend beyond the horizon of the gaze; within it, the sound of the silence preceding an awaited return, and in that silence, the gentle sound of surf and wind, of lungs filling with air and blood flowing through veins, of living wood creaking—sounds in which only those who have time to wait can take part.

The result of two years of research, structured through choreographic residencies in Italy and Portugal, this work brings two different languages into dialogue on stage: dance and prose. It occupies an indefinable space of genre—not dance and not theatre, but both languages stitched into two parallel and “incidentally” connected narratives.

Its narrative structure responds to the specific dramaturgical choice of a non-linear time-space, of a chronological disorder which replaces the logic and direction of Ulysses’ voyage at sea with the complex, rich inner wandering of the waiting bride.

Thus, the woman appears on stage simultaneously as the young Penelope at the dawn of a solitary waiting still to come—embodied by dancer Chiara Michelini—and as the elderly woman who has waited indefinitely and who, not always lucid, sometimes forgets the object of her enduring expectation. Through the voice of actress Maria Cristina Valentini, she is ready to share with us her passionate, loving and at times disillusioned travel diary. (S. Mazzotta)