ZEROGRAMMI
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the other: in this order, a multi-award-winning medium-length film, a performance, a photographic book enriched by an unpublished text by Eugenio Barba, and lastly a community project that, accompanying the access of the performance, continues and multiplies the dialogue with new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.
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.
Raul Brandao
In Elegia delle cose perdute is the emotional landscape which the reference material conjures up – a scenery at once raw, harsh, dream-like, and illusory – is that of exile, of nostalgia, of the German sehnsucht. It is the landscape of memory: that is to say, the traces we leave behind us, the substance of our roots, of our identity. It contains, at the same time, the separation from all this, which engenders the feeling of moral exile: dreams of an impossible return, rage against time that annihilates, farewells to what is now lost, to the reference points on the map of our inward journey.
By investigating the theme of exile – beyond its geographical meaning– this performance tells of the moral condition of anyone who feels a stranger to the world he lives in, finding himself in a state of suspension between past and future, hope and nostalgia. The longing that this condition entails is not so much the longing for a stationary, frozen eternity, but rather for a series of new beginnings, for a place that remains fixed, a place where the condition of exile can breed new life, living matter, and help one resist, persist, change. The scenes that make up the choreography become the map of a journey across the (inner) spaces of the characters of Os Pobres: forlorn, destitute figures, though clumsy to the point of being clownish, who share the same feeling of sorrowful nostalgia and the same longing for redemption. The span that separates the observer from these stories (and them, in turn, from the shared dream to which they aspire) is a poetic distance reminiscent of Leopardi, the incommensurable mark where land gives way to precariousness, to the feeling of being suspended in a vacuum, to a grotesque parade of transient characters, like clowns in folk theatre; a theatre that is born of a common yearning, that happens with no need for frills, that performs anywhere, in meadow, alleyway, or courtyard, in any ‘anthropological place’ (M. Augé); a posthouse at the day’s end, with its horizons, its distances, its longings projected towards tomorrow, its vanishing points. In this elegy of the emptiness that remains, bodies and landscape come into dialogue, they recognize a common yearning in one another, a somersault of thought, a movement that is vertigo, dancing with abandon to the suspended tempo of a waltz, the cyclical march of a longing sadness, that demands to be celebrated, to be lived, with a desire not of possession, but rather of belonging. And here, within this frame, all ideas of possible misery or poverty suddenly vanish, nothing exists anymore that may be truly lost.
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A LIVE
PERFORMANCE
(...) Stefano Mazzotta mette in scena un’opera di pura poesia, sprigionata da una comunità derelitta, esiliata, portatrice d’inquietudini, di desideri, di aspirazioni, di ricerca e attaccamenti alle proprie radici, di abbandono e di speranza.
Giuseppe Distefano | Cittanuova
Attraverso capriole del pensiero, simbolismi a volte blandi a volte duri come consunte suole di scarpe sotto i denti, l’Elegia delle cose perdute ricuce sulla pelle del pubblico le amicizie, gli amori, i dissapori, le morti e le vite di questi simulacri di umanità spaiati e manchevoli.
Francesco Chiaro | Persinsala
Un clima intenso, ricco di suggestione, con corpi che dialogano fra loro e col pubblico. Una storia che si dipana fra personaggi in lotta contro un avverso destino, ma uniti dalla condivisione dell’avventura esistenziale.
Sandro Allegrini | Perugiatoday
(...) Elegìa delle cose perdute riesce con grande poesia a restituirci l’anima del libro di Brandao, delle classi povere rurali, dei semplici, ma ci ricorda anche da dove veniamo, da quale realtà povera e contadina sorga questo paese ora arrogante nel sentirsi ricco e civile, vincente anche quando cor- roso dalle miserie, totalmente sradicato perché incapace di ricordate per cosa ha combattuto e su quali ceneri è risorto.
Enrico Pastore | Il Pickwick
Incedono solennemente, con calma e rispetto, attirati dal desiderio di non essere più soli. Conmovenze delicate, quasi fragili nella loro dolcezza, danno vita a scene che si scompongono e ricompongono al ritmo di una musica e delle ambientazioni sonore che riportano ad un passato autentico, ruvido.
Letizia Mologni | Albanoarte Teatro
Elegia delle cose perdute è l’emblema di una poetica attenta alla realtà circostante. Arricchita dalle storie de “I Poveri”, uomini pervasi da mancanze e desideri dal romanzo del portoghese Raul Brandao, l’opera diventa anche sorprendentemente attuale, offrendo uno spaccato, indiretto e interessante, delle privazioni e delle speranze di oggi.
Daria Chiappe | Danzasi
Blessed are the moments, millimeters and shadows of the little things.
Fernando PessoaThis 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.
soggetto, regia e coreografia / subject, direction and choreography Stefano Mazzotta | una riscrittura da / a rewrite from Os Pobres di / by Raul Brandao | creato con e interpretato da / created with and interpreted by Alessio Rundeddu, Amina Amici, Damien Camunez, Gabriel Beddoes, Manuel Martin, Chiara Guglielmi, Riccardo Micheletti | collaborazione alla drammaturgia / collaboration to the dramaturgy Anthony Mathieu, Fabio Chiriatti | luci / lights Tommaso Contu | assistente di scena / stage assistant Riccardo Micheletti | costumi e scene / sets and costumes Stefano Mazzotta | segreteria di produzione / production assistant Maria Elisa Carzedda | produzione / production Zerogrammi | coproduzione / coproduction Festival Danza Estate - Bergamo (It), La meme balle – Avignon (Fr), La Nave del Duende - Caceres (Sp) | con il contributo di / with the contribution of Residenza artistica artisti sul territorio INTERCONNESSIONI / Tersicorea / Sardegna, Comune di Settimo S. Pietro, Comune di Selargius, Soprintendenza Archeologica Belle Arti e Paesaggio per la Città Metropolitana di Cagliari e le Province di Oristano e Sud Sardegna, Regione Sardegna, Regione Piemonte, MIC - Ministero della Cultura, FONDAZIONE Banco di Sardegna | in collaborazione con/in collaboration with CASA LUFT, Ce.D.A.C Sardegna - centro diffusione attività culturali circuito multidisciplinare dello spettacolo dal vivo, PERIFERIE ARTISTICHE - Centro di Residenza Multidisciplinare della Regione Lazio - Supercinema, Tuscania
AN
ART FILM
Il cielo, il sole, la luna, le case all’imbrunire, i piedi inquadrati mentre passano sempre davanti alle stesse porte, la donna che piange , le danze collettive animano dall’interno un paesaggio pieno di bellezza quanto lontano da estetismi di maniera: un montaggio figlio del corpo narrante.
Francesca Pedroni | Il Manifesto
(...) Opera di grande maturità estetica. (...) Mazzotta spiega che il tempo fermo dei personaggi ripete la dimensione fotografica della natura dei ricordi: ed è un modo di trattenere, in fondo, ciò che appare rétro, mentre è soltanto in ritardo.
Stefano Tomassini | Artribune
It’s a masterful piece, having the structure of a dance film without spoken words, and also of a narrative feature film inspired by Os Pobres, a novel by Rau Brandäo. We find feelings of exile, loss, decadence, remembrance, nostalgia, even humor. Dance theater is emotively interpreted, reminding of Pina Bausch’s taste. The photographs and images are composed in a very fine artistically way, making definitely a grand scale classic Italian film.
The Giury | Riff Festival Norway 2022
(...) Out of all 29 films, the highlight of this year’s PDFF is the Italian film Elegy of Lost Things, a stunning 48-minute art piece depicting life in a rural town. (...) The 48-minute-long film views like an arthaus flick and delivers stunning performances in both dance and acting from the cast. The choreography is as wonderfully subtle and asymetrical as the shot choices and the coloring, which adds a realistic sun-bleached haze over the quietly riveting story. Elegy of Lost Things is impeccable in its versatility, offering humour, tragedy, family drama, mundanity, camaraderie, joy, and melancholy all in one. With thematic nods to Pina Bausch’s The Nelken Line, it is a revelation of a dance film that should not be missed, the best since the works of Édouard Lock’s La La La Human Stepsand the beloved 1991 Reines d’un Jour (Queens for a Day) by Swiss director Pascal Magnin.
Amy Leona Havin | OREGON ARTSWATCH
Un affresco verista con al centro un’umanità derelitta. Stilemi che rimandano a Dostoevskij e si intrecciano alla poetica di Grazia Deledda. (…) Paesaggi panoramici e umani alla Isabel Allende. Volti segnati dal logorio della vita. Primissimi piani e panoramiche alla Sergio Leone. (…) Un inno alla vita che non sconfessa la morte. “Elegia delle cose perdute” è un fiume di lacrime, di grida, di mistero. L’onda nuvolosa mette a nudo le radici più profonde. Il torrente porta con sé sventure e risa; senza posa, trascina questa terra umana verso una spiaggia dove le mani squallide di chi ha soVerto trovano finalmente la mano che le sostiene. Dove gli occhi dei poveri, che ne hanno abbastanza di piangere, si stupiscono all’alba eterna, dove il sogno diventa realtà.
Vincenzo Sardelli | KLP
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.
Fernando 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
una riscrittura da / a rewrite from Os Pobres di / by Raul Brandao | soggetto, regia e coreografie / project, direction and choreographies Stefano Mazzotta | co-regia / co-direction Massimo Gasole | progetto realizzato con il contributo di / project realized with the contribution of Interconnessioni (residenze artistiche in Sardegna – direzione Simonetta Pusceddu / Tersicorea - ai sensi dell’intesa Stato-Regioni sancita il 21.09.2017 e in attuazione dell’articolo 43 del D.M. 27.07.2017) | creato con e interpretato da / created with and interpreted by Alessio Rundeddu, Amina Amici, Damien Camunez, Gabriel Bedoes, Manuel Martin, Miriam Cinieri, Lucrezia Maimone, Simone Zambelli | e con / and with Sara Angius, Elisa Zedda | con la partecipazione speciale di / special guests Antonio Piovanelli, Bonaria Ghidoni, Loredana Parrella | collaborazione alla drammaturgia / collaboration to the dramaturgy Fabio Chiriatti, Anthony Mathieu | operatori di ripresa / camera operators Massimo Gasole, Damiano Picciau | riprese aeree / aerial shots Alberto Masala | montaggio / editing Massimo Gasole | foley soundesign, mix audio Emanuele Pusceddu | color grading e direttore della fotografia / color grading and director of photography Damiano Picciau | trucco e parrucco / make up Federica Li | costumi e scene / costumes and sets Stefano Mazzotta | luci / lights Tommaso Contu | segreteria di produzione / production assistant Maria Elisa Carzedda | produzione / production Zerogrammi | in collaborazione con / in collaboration with Tersicorea_Officina delle arti sceniche, Illador Films, Casa Luft, Arca del tempo, Festival Danza Estate, C.ie La meme balle, La nave del duende | con il contributo di / with the contribution of Twain _ periferie artistiche_centro di residenza della Regione Lazio | con il sostegno di / with the support of Mic, Regione autonoma della Sardegna, Regione Piemonte, Fondazione di Sardegna, Soprintendenza Archeologica, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per la città metropolitana di Cagliari e le provincie di Oristano e Sud Sardegna, Comune di Settimo San Pietro, Comune di Selargius, Comune di Quartucciu, Ce.D.A.C Sardegna_circuito multidisciplinare dello spettacolo dal vivo | luoghi / locations Galleria Rifugio Don Bosco_sec. XVIII (Cagliari), Casa Baldussi (Settimo San Pietro), Casa Pilleri (Settimo San Pietro), Casa Comunale Dessy (Settimo San Pietro), Casa privata Dessy (Settimo San Pietro), Stagno di Sal’e Porcu (Oristano), Spiaggia di Kal’e Moru (Geremeas/Quartu Sant’Elena), Parco Archeologico Cuccuru Nuraxi (Settimo San Pietro), Casa campidanese Zuddas di Angelo e Sara Fadelli (Dolianova) | un ringraziamento a / thanks to Elisabetta Milia, Alessandro Baldussi, Sandro Perra, Raffaele Lai, Angelo e Sara Fadelli, Salvatore Medda, Valentina Tibaldi, Silvia Battaglio, Cooperativa Specus, Cooperativa Bios
A PHOTO
BOOK
In the creation trajectory of Elegìa delle cose perdute (Elegy of lost things), a tiny editorial project named STORIEDIVENTO has been launched. Its aim is to generate a space for sharing the copious photographic and research material that Zerogrammi's creative processes often collect. The first chapter of this project is precisely the publication ELEGìA DELLE COSE PERDUTE_un diario fotografico. It includes contributions by Simonetta Pusceddu, Anthony Mathieu and Eugenio Barba as a compendium of a selection of shots taken by choreographer Stefano Mazzotta during the creation residencies of the show.
A FUTURA MEMORIA is an ensemble performance staged in unconventional spaces, a transcultural, intergenerational project open to many participants, the setting for open dialogue on themes such as identity and belonging, memory and relations, that are explored, shared, developed through movement and dance. The project was conceived within Elegia delle cose perdute (Elegy of lost things). But, as for this creation, the project accompanies all the company’s choreographic productions becoming, in the relationship with different communities and territories, a tool for reflection around common themes that decline in themselves the concepts of identity, roots, memory, belonging and future. The use of movement as a tool of inquiry, as a space for personal expression and interpersonal relations, acts as the medium for a culture of closeness, of proximity. An investment on people’s quality of life, a way to support and promote territories, cultures, peculiarities, to foster awareness of identity and rights: personal, civil, social rights. Our physical, emotional body is a living archive of experience.
The project aims to offer communities a new way to narrate themselves, through collaborative processes that are open to others. Every human body is a diary, an archive of memories, each contributing to what we are, to the way we move and communicate. We can learn to read through these “ways”, to dance on them, letting them spell out the rich vocabulary of our story.
A COMMUNITY PROJECT
