Transumanze

The text has been stripped down to a bare minimum: a series of tales tinged with nostalgia instead of a single story, no plot but rather a series of frames staging people, not characters; bodies bruised by loss, abandonment, separation, filled with enchantment and disenchantment.   

Five people, three women and two men from different generations and geographies, tell us about dissimilar experiences but common wounds. As a group or alone, they forge a delicate, concise and poetic dramaturgy. For the duration of the play, about one hour, bodies cross a diaphragm which symbolically divides the stage into “a here vs. a there”, a “to be vs. not to be”, and for each actor on stage we, the spectators, are able to glimpse and to imagine a plot or a story (with a small “s”). As one of the three actresses recites “Objects remember, gestures remember, looks, silences, and wounds remember; all the words, they remember (…)”, images slide along a fictitious wall in a cleverly staged arrangement: images of races and old photographs representing ancestors of the actors. We recognise them because their faces look alike: grandparents, mothers, uncles? We wonder if they are they still alive. Clothes floating on water later emerge onto the screen to take our minds back to the present and today’s tragedies. It is not easy to recount such an ending, and yet we can feel the empathy and respect that emanate from Cristina Castrillo, the director.        

Everyone weaves their own life into this piece of fabric, leaving room for joy too. The projection of a painting by Chagall demurely depicting a bright landscape gives space to hope, to the memory of harmony and perhaps even of happiness. Along the same lines, a letter with uncertain writing and broken Italian shows up on the canvas: “Dear mother, first the winter snow left and then all the spring flowers too. The great heat stayed for a long time but I played with the others. The first dry leaves are flying and maybe now you come and we see each other soon.”

(Tiziana Conte)

• distrib

  Text
  Cristina Castrillo 

  Direction
  Cristina Castrillo

  With
  Bruna Gusberti, Massimo Palo, Nunzia Tirelli, Carlo Verre, Irene Zucchinelli

  Video
  Cristina Castrillo, Mario Conforti

  Collaboration
  Giona Beltrametti, Raffaella Ferloni, Manuel Mainieri

  Direction Assistance
  Camilla Parini

  Production
  Teatro delle Radici

  Surtitles (german)
  Anna Kasten

• link