VISITATIO

Visitatio is dedicated to all those who have not ceased to search in their dreams, in the night skies, in the ancient tales, in the long waiting. To all those who have not ceased to search in the longing for a feast, for the sense of this strange game in which we, the tragic comedians, are forced to play.

Sometimes strange presences come to visit us, like shadows from unknown memories, from illusion or from magic. They have the consistency of a “déjà vu”, the density of a dream, the strength (vigour) of a calling. Suddenly a world made of unknown memories opens up in front of us and gives us glimpses of future and past that are overlapping each other. We have the sensation to be visited by messengers who have come to dialog with us, bringing secrets, bringing lost images and premonitions.
I think that we all have been visited, at least once. We all have experienced strange and mysterious encounters. And there are places that favour these events. Piers are among these places; strips of land like bridges between sea and earth. Places where to withdraw, where to stay alone a moment, like a solitary castaway. The talk of the fishermen, fastened to the sea by a slim nylon thread, peoples the piers, ever present. The dense silence of the poets. The stupor of the tourists. The craving of women to runaway from home.
Like a pier, the stage is a place that favours certain visitations. Without its phantasms a theatre is not a theatre. We breathe an ancient air, dust, and if we keep silent we may detect echoes: they are sentences, laughter, tears, love and unfaithfulness, they are the noise of humanity. If we can listen to it from far away, we have the impression that it is always celebrating in a kind of folly. Theatres are like shells in which the noise of the human sea is kept. Theatres keep the restless doubts and insecurities of the theatre people, we, a people full of incertitude, of theories, of adventurous invented techniques, to make real what is born to be the mirror of reality.
This production, in the form of a rhapsody, uses subtle, cunning theatrical techniques to reveal itself through oneiric images. Devices like painted horizons on enormous gauzes, like angels suspended by the waist with ropes and sheaves, like the many questions, considerations and arguments that actors and dancers have behind the wings. This production is not a single tale because it is “many tales” at the same time.
Ana accompanies this journey, suspended between the reality of the playing and the magic of illusion. She is lead by the other performers into a pathway, into the reproduction of a small labyrinth where “nothing” tells us something precise and “everything” hints of something that can be dreamed.

Daniele Finzi Pasca