IL RACCONTO DELL'ISOLA SCONOSCIUTA

The choreographic project Il racconto dell’isola sconosciuta (The Tale of the Unknown Island), freely inspired by the work of José Saramago, is part of a larger artistic project around the theme of time, its flow and the emotional and social condition that this relationship triggers. In the wake of the previous Elegìa delle cose perdute (whose choreographic paintings decline our relationship with the past, with what is abandoned, lost, left behind, returning a reflection on themes such as memory, nostalgia, belonging and exile) this creation focuses its research on the relationship with the future time, on the suspended and uncertain condition that brings our experiences towards further desires and all hopes still to be realised.

This relationship, this distinctly human perception of time and its passing is part of our nature as narrative beings, naturally predisposed to tell and listening to stories in which we can identify, rooted in past experience and coming alive again in the present, telling us what we are and what we are part of in order to guide us through the passage of time.

The nature that moves us multiplies around its meanings and reasons for the sole purpose of focusing on a meaning of living. Rooted within it is the question of questions, the mysterious place of departures and returns in philosophy and human thought since the dawn of time: who am I?

In the persistence of the question lies the hunger to name all things, to know and distinguish oneself: the logos essential to define an identity.

Yet this is still not enough because, on the other hand, we are all more to this definition, another, a change and a contradiction, an unknown place yet and always to be discovered.

Therefore, the answer will be continuously insufficient and the journey in search of the self will be incessant, lacerating and inconclusive.

What we are is in the question: it is neither given nor certain, it is "the one, the none, the hundred thousand" (Pirandello), it is the sum of the millimeters of the journey, it is a depth that lingers under the soles of our feet.

Yet life is nothing more than an eternal present and our existence is the experience of the instant: the Goethian Augenblick in a thirsty search for the meaning of life, is in a liquid space that is surface and as far as our eyes can see, floating and suspended over the past below us which is submerged under the sea of time.

Quando uno vive, vive e non si vede.

Luigi Pirandello

A man asks the king for a boat to go in search of an unknown island. Having fulfilled his request, he sets off (or dreams of setting off) on a poetic and dreamlike journey, rich in symbols and metaphors. The one dreamed of or undertaken by the man is thus a journey that will lead him to the search for himself, to the awareness of what he is willing to leave behind in the harbour in order to set sail free, a journey of growth of the kind that happens to the protagonists of every fairy tale for which the most courageous and frightening of acts of faith is required of him: abandoning certainty and embracing the unknown, the question, the mystery and the enchantment. He will cross, in the metaphor of the sea voyage, his own depths, moving and unravelling words he did not know he had, embracing his fragility as the most distinctive part of himself, and realising that he himself is the mysterious island he is seeking, the question, the eternally unknown and unplaceable place because it is part of an eternal change, a journey that forgets the departure and departure that longs for the return to or from an unknown beyond-island, invisible that becomes concrete and attainable only in its depiction, tension of discovery, cradle of memory, crucible of departures and returns, identity.