ELEGìA DELLE COSE PERDUTE

A GENESIS

Inspired by Os pobres, a harsh and painful novel by the Portuguese writer and historian Raul Brandão, Elegìa delle cose perdute is a complex choreographic project that has engaged Zerogrammi dance company over three years of artistic process as a part of the residency programme Artisti nei territori / Interconnessioni in Sardinia (Italy). In the articulated creative trajectory that led to its creation, the company, following a working method consolidated over the years, questioned different territories, contexts and languages, collecting a living archive of materials and testimonies that nourished the dancing body with signs and inspirations not only of a choreographic nature but also coming from other vocabularies (visual arts, video, photography, literature) and from an experience of the world that is substantiated in the relationship with places and people outside the conventional frames of theatre. This process led to four different declinations, one interconnected with the other: in this order, a multi-award-winning medium-length film, a performance, a photographic book enriched by an unpublished text by Eugenio Barba, and lastly a community project that, accompanying the access of the performance, continues and multiplies the dialogue with new territories and communities. 

SYNOPSIS

Blessed are the moments, millimeters and shadows of the little things. (F. Pessoa)

This is the tragicomic story of a group of souls: poor and derelict people, the humus of the world (R. Brandao). Worn out clothes, with earth nuances, badly cover the livid, pale skin to the point that the last light of the sunset seems to make it shine with gold. Their stories, despite their different kind of exiles to which they are subjected, have the same feeling of emptiness, generated by an inexorable absence. They share the same black misery inscribed in an uninterrupted present, of a clownish and tender sadness.

From time to time the minor euphony of simple and popular songs whispered to the sky at night accompanies them or a melancholy pace of a nostalgic waltz comes through. What remains of their actions, of their useless efforts is the story of a feeling of lost things. Among them a poet named Gabirù is living there, suspended on the edge of this scenic space that has the colours of a post station or of a frontier. Everything they treat as boundary without a handhold, an embankment, a fulfilment, a conclusion, for the poet is the hyperbole from a here and now that is the beginning, trespassing, invitation to travel, to crossing, to a metamorphosis. From the confine of the present, Gabirù’s words move his stage mates beyond the purgatory of forgetfulness and noise, within a poetic and silent time, no longer distant but liveable, transitable. A nostalgia for things that never happened, of a small never lost homeland, the place of an invented memory, a past, a present, a future thought on the figures of this invention.

The words and the dance of the poet trace the hyperbole towards the redemption of a promised land. The place where you can go without ever reaching it, through a desire, a somersault of your thought, a spiral of the heart, the over a hedge-limit of Leopardian memory, from which one can contemplate the disarming beauty of infinity.