In 2026, Zerogrammi celebrates its 25th anniversary: a quarter-century of creations, of bodies crossing the stage in search of lightness, of stories holding together irony and fragility, discipline and wonder. To mark this anniversary, as part of Past Forward—the project through which the company reactivates and shares its choreographic heritage—we return to the point of origin: “Zerogrammi”, the first work created in 2005, the seed from which everything took shape.

Bringing this work back to life means re-entering a room of memory that is still filled with light. It means rediscovering the playful urgency of two young artists seeking a dance that could fly without leaving the ground: a poetry made of simple objects, delicate gags and a human lightness which, over time, has become a distinctive feature of the company’s poetics. Today, twenty years after its creation, Zerogrammi returns to the stage like a photo album that has not lost its colour: a performance that continues to speak to us, to move us and to remind us why we began to dance.

Zerogrammi fully achieves its creators’ intentions, unfolding on stage with the lightness of a soap bubble. Yet in its reflection one can catch every nuance of a delicate choreography that immediately calls Buster Keaton to mind, not least for its alchemy of smile and melancholy, and for the way it fills the pauses of existence with that “nothing” made of small neuroses, fleeting memories, instantaneous reflections and incorporeal tenderness. F. Farina, Corriere della Sera

Entertaining, with a clownish yet cultivated cheerfulness: multiplied references to music, dance and circus, cinema and visual art, all gathered in a fresh, light sequence of inventions, discoveries and experiments within a stylised everyday life made abstract and surreal. Stefano Mazzotta and Emanuele Sciannamea—authors, directors, choreographers and performers of “Zerogrammi”—are truly excellent. V. Ottolenghi, Gazzetta di Parma

It has been performed dozens and dozens of times, touring Europe’s off-festival circuit and auteur dance theatres, dispensing nonsense and wordplay, dance, theatre, clowning and mime—distracted, absurd, everyday, illogical, yet as disciplined as a poem by Wisława Szymborska. It resembles her in its irony and paradox, contradiction and litotes; in its miniature-like narrative structure; in its very brief yet evocative account of essential enigmas, expressed with concise elegance. C. Allasia, La Repubblica

danz’è / ORIENTE OCCIDENTE AWARD 2008

GIOCATEATRO AWARD FOR BEST PERFORMANCE 2009

THE ORIGINAL SYNOPSIS

Two teddy bears and a Barbie doll with her head taped back on, passing the time in a surreal Déjeuner sur l’Herbe that seems painted by Jacques Tati. Playing seriously, when play becomes the only serious thing that can save us from the solemnity of life. The games of two Candides somewhere between Cochi and Renato, Laurel and Hardy, the theatre of Marcel Marceau and Merce Cunningham: dressed like gentle village eccentrics in caps—the kind with aviator earflaps from the Great War, worn in peacetime.

Hats for flying without leaving the ground. Or rather, gliding with the engine off, carried by the air—easy as a Sunday morning. “Zerogrammi”: in other words, a weightless dance. Light. A dance for flying—for the flight without take-off we mentioned—and then gliding and gliding once again over everyday life, over the small things we must not forget. Remember to breathe.

Gliding, carried by the wind of our lightness—yes, let us call them frivolities too, because it helps us breathe more easily and see everything clearly, being only a few centimetres above the grass of ordinary days, those that come once a week and become unique in these tiny games and innocent quarrels, when we can be two clowns. Two mimes and contemporary dancers, perhaps tango dancers too if Bésame Mucho is playing on the radio; actors, and in any case simply two ordinary people in ridiculous hats and funny sweaters. (...)

Two clowns in a performance as light as love at its beginning, as gentle as the sweetest wind on a spring evening, back when there were still seasons in between: beautiful and delicate like the person each of us has—or waits for—in moments of happiness and freedom from care. Those moments without whose memory we could not live.

Sergio Gilles Lacavalla