Stefano Mazzotta and the Zerogrammi company’s intuition to return that tragedy to the body, to flesh—to pass through it without recourse to words and, above all, not descriptively, but as a reflection of what happens at a deeper level, that of consciousness—proves extremely effective. (...) “Thyestes” stages the loss of identity—indeed, its disintegration—and a body wounded to its core, like the rough wooden logs scattered across the stage, still bearing the marks of their cuts. Francesca Maria Rizzotti / KLP

Dance crosses the dark heart of Seneca’s Thyestes, retracing its tragic force through gestures, whispers, emptiness and silence. It is myth distilled to its rawest essence: revenge, fratricidal violence, flesh, a cannibalistic feast. At its centre stands the thirst for power of a heart at war—a corrosive force contaminating every affection and dissolving every bond.

Dance becomes an act of domination and oppression, and the body is deformed and consumed by it. Every movement is a wound; every pause, a restrained cry. The bare, essential stage becomes the site of an inner and political struggle, where ambition and humiliation pursue one another to the point of annihilation. The tragedy is not narrated: it takes place. Dance gives body to a divided and lacerated soul, where victim and perpetrator coexist, fight, and finally recognise one another.

The disintegration of identity, the struggle for recognition, the body as a site of conflict. Seneca’s work is an abyss: Thyestes is not merely the story of an inhuman revenge, but a tragic device laying bare the most perverse nature of power. In this choreographic study, the ancient text becomes living material for a physical, visceral and contemporary investigation of power as a destructive impulse, and of its inevitable entanglement with abuse, manipulation and humiliation.

Atreus and Thyestes coexist and overlap within the same body, like two forces that collide, contaminate and destroy one another on a bare, almost sacrificial stage. Power is not represented but enacted: it appears in muscular tension, obsessive repetition, the imposition of gesture, control and collapse. Abuse is not a narrated event, but a choreographic dynamic. Movement becomes domination, silence becomes coercion, the body turns into a battlefield.

References to the myth do not seek to reconstruct it, but to detonate its core: brothers betraying one another, children sacrificed, kingdoms conquered upon the ruins of intimacy. Dance moves through these themes as one moves through a wound: without illustrating, without seeking resolution, listening to the deep sound of its protagonist, to its fury—still so close to our own.

The creation Thyestes inaugurates Zerogrammi’s Past Forward project: a process of rewriting that travels back through the company’s artistic archive, redrawing the urgencies that have shaped its creative trajectory over 25 years.