IL FILM_ELEGìA DELLE COSE PERDUTE

PLOT

I am nothing.

I’ll never be anything.

I couldn’t want to be something.

Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

(F. Pessoa)

A shaggy and dusty Sardinia. A dance as rocky as the mountains, as bare as the dry branches of the trees and the shrubs scorched by a blinding sun. Time wears down the architecture and depopulates the villages. It scratches the walls, from which yellowed rubble is peeling away. It chips away at fixtures and window frames. Time is dust. It accumulates in empty houses. It settles on objects, fossilising them. Time is a stone in the hands of an old man, polished by the elements. (...) The crackling of footsteps. The rustle of shoes on the pavement. The dry rumbling of earth cleared by a spade. The warm vibration of guitar strings. The enveloping screech of the bow on the strings of violas and violins. A slow, painful dance. The dream of a madman. The delirium of a clown. The disconnected pain of a woman dressed in black. Figures with a mechanical gait, with an absent look like Kantor's characters, perpetually on the ridge between life and death. Weeping. A mute nostalgia, escaping through the body, with ankylosed choreographies made of spasms and syncope. The Nuragic landscape of Sardinia is a parched and abandoned horizon. In this land of desolate souls, the camera remains still. It delivers us a photographic novel in pictures. The colour palette is dim. The long, very long shots stand out against a dramatic horizon that is more uneasy in contrast to the luminosity of this Mediterranean, rocky, prehistoric South. The steady, frontal eye of the camera investigates the colours and leaves their mystery unaltered. The sea at five in the morning. The disruptive wind of a parched August. These creatures belong to death. They smell their own decomposition. But they cannot rationalise it. They find no rest. A sense of exile pervades the choreographies of unrelenting, unresolved characters, who find an idea of closeness and community in contact with water, a synonym of drowning, an allegory of shipwreck, an invitation to cross, a symbol of rebirth. The sea makes life and death one. It initiates the resurrection of bodies as still as frames, after a last supper where even food is a celebration of absence. Ancient costumes and objects. Everything is fixed: the pain, the glances, the memories, the dance. Lost and exiled women. Disarticulated and disintegrated men. Everyone has mourning to process. They mourn things people, themselves. They are zombies in the half-light. They celebrate their own funeral before digging their own grave with their own hands. Stefano Mazzotta, graduated at Koreja and Paolo Grassi school, multimedia artist in assiduity with the “Third Theatre', intersects choreographic dance, literature, photography, and plastic arts. And it finds the pharmakon in the wound itself.

The dancers metabolise their own death when they become conscious of it. They overcome it in the chorus that comforts the pain. They give form to a unanimous dance, where magic and madness coexist. A shipwreck in an ancestral South. A journey reminiscent of “Miracolo a Milano”, but also of a madman's dream in “Train de vie”. Panoramic and human landscapes à la Isabel Allende. Faces marked by the wear and tear of life. Close-ups and panoramas à la Sergio Leone. Shostakovich’s trite 'Waltz No. 2' starts an angular choral dance, even more striking because it is framed from above. Flared. Never in time with the music. And it is precisely in the resulting dynamism that the redemption of this rural and wild South refractory to tourist routes peeps out, like an Arabian Phoenix ready to rise from its own ashes. A hymn to life that does not defeat death. “Elegìa delle cose perdute" is a river of tears, of cries, of mystery. The cloudy wave lays bare the deepest roots. The torrent carries with it misfortune and laughter; ceaselessly, it drags this human land towards a beach where the bleak hands of those who have suffered finally find the hand that supports them. Where the eyes of the poor, who have had enough of crying, marvel at the eternal dawn, where the dream becomes reality.

(From a review by Vincenzo Sardelli for KLP)

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.

REFERENCES

In an extremely bleak world of resignation and discomfort, of unsolved existential questions and extreme deprivation, the characters of Brandão's novel, segregated within the blackest misery like the inmates of that prison that seems to be life, stage a slow procession of bitter reflections from which a general law that regulates the transient journey of man is finally drawn: the living have no other purpose but to die and finally become humus, manure to feed the worms and the Earth that despite everything keeps turning. Written in Portugal at the beginning of the 20th century, a nation grappling with the inevitable failure of its colonial project, with the consequences of ever-increasing internal impoverishment and with the unravelling of the beautiful projects of modern urbanization, “The Poor” is a bitter and painful novel that leaves no room for good sentiments nor for wishes for salvation: men are damned, the poor above all, the most destitute; they are inhabitants of the darkness that lies outside, in the open air of a sky that weighs like a lid, and of that which lies within, in the soul of each one.

May life follow its splendid course. It has a dream and iron flavour. It’s tenderness, disgrace, desperation. It takes us in, it drags us, it pushes us, it fills us up with illusion, it scatters us to every corner of the globe. It bruises us. It raises us. It knocks us out. It protects us. It drenches us in the same muddy vortex. It kills us. However, even just for a moment, it forces us to look up and until the end we remain with loopy eyes.

(R. Brandao)