INRI

The characters of this story, whose colors are grotesque, paradoxical, and improbable in their veracity, move on stage emulating a bizarre liturgy: a ceremony where (as in the deepest traditions of southern Italy) the sacred easily mingles with the profane, where religion smells of tangerines over Christmas cribs, where the Bolero echoes through the squares after holy processions. They describe a religion of devoted old rosary-bearing wo- men wearing black clothes, whose God, after being blessed, follows them into their homes and everyday life. In the way they transform words and silence into dance, there is language of exposed bodies, a choreography of steps, now painful, now angelic, played as a parody of religious and daily sanctimony that belongs to our culture.

There is a sacred and profane, cruel and tender, ironic and tragic universe in the liturgy of gestures, of askew genuflections, of awkward postures, of crooked forms of expression which exude an innocent clumsiness. In the details of praying hands powered by swirling and hypnotic designs reminiscent of Pina Bausch’s dance. In the ecstatic stop-motions of mouths and eyes. In the liturgies of legs and arms put in Crucifixion, and a Baroque Deposition, which refer to popular icons. There are sounds and voices from small villages, processions of Virgins, litanies and scented rosaries, an ardent Kyrie Eleison on which the dance stuns and charms. There is the sound of a quiet mysticism, and the suspension of any miracle, there is hysteria of muscles and nude backs. Finally, there is in all this, in that wasteland, yet inhabited by visions, a sense of immortal and deep wait of the soul in search of spirituality. (Giuseppe Distefano)