(...) The award for best contemporary dance performance, given to “Punto di fuga” (Vanishing Point), opens towards the future. The work is an Italian-Russian co-production which, in 2011—the year of cultural exchange between the two countries—brought together the young companies Zerogrammi from Turin and Dialogue Dance from Kostroma.

It was in the Russian city, in February 2011, that Emanuele Sciannamea and Stefano Mazzotta—dancers and choreographers from Southern Italy, trained at Milan’s prestigious Paolo Grassi School and emerging with their agile ensemble—arrived. Neither the minus 25-degree Russian winter nor their knowledge of only a few words of Pushkin’s language discouraged them. Together with two performers from Dialogue Dance, they created “Punto di fuga”, an all-male piece which, balancing strength and irony, reinterprets Seneca’s Thyestes.

Acclaimed in Kostroma in winter and at Turin’s Teatro a Corte festival in summer, the newly awarded “Punto di fuga” encapsulates the thoughts of its four young creators: “Encounter—and therefore exchange—is the only true wealth worth pursuing.” V. Bonelli, Russia Oggi

Power is the exercise of boundaries: how to draw and travel the lines of existence, while simultaneously exploring the questioning territory of coexistence—where the vocabulary of possibility is revealed.

Power is a game of moral balancing, resistant labour and the geometry of limits. To deprive, or to deprive oneself, before the banquet of possession. This meal for two, a laid table of possible conquests, is a treatise on force: on yielding and resisting, consuming and preserving, succumbing and renouncing, or subjugating. It is obsessively retold through what remains of two bodies caught in the act of contention.

They are the brothers of Senecan tragedy Thyestes, harsh and merciless in their lust for possession; they are what remains of them—terrible shadows, birds of the night—recalling Tantalus, an embodiment of strife, hatred and atrocity. They sit composed at the laid table where, according to the Latin tragedian’s account, the most brutal of revenges will be enacted.

They are held in the instant before the story’s climax: that space in which doubt and tension, having reached their peak and repeated through infinite time, alter and fracture their outward composure, gradually dismantling the forms of etiquette. Here, tragedy is already unfolding through the steady drip of questioning, possibility and futile hope; through the overturning of logic, the excess of desire, the impossibility of absolute reason, and the monsters produced by its dream.

With PASTO A DUE (A Meal for Two), the diptych inspired by the myth of the Atreides—begun with the earlier work PUNTO DI FUGA—comes to a close.