The Garden

  • by Gaetano Palermo
  • with Sara Bertolucci
  • set design Antonino Leocata
  • sound design / technical direction Luca Gallio

Tutto sarà com’è ora, solo un po’ diverso

The Garden is the garden of earthly delights, of forbidden aspirations, an artificial paradise still to do. According to a rabbinic parable, beloved by Walter Benjamin, in the messianic world things are as on earth but just a bit shifted from their mundane position. The degree of this shift, the littlest swing that would achieve paradise on earth, is not given to us. The performance aims to investigate the measure and the value of this displacement through a choreography of gesture and postures, on which is grafted a vocal score written in collaboration with Sara Bertolucci. A crucial aspect of the dramaturgical research is, in fact, the Kulning, a traditional Swedish chant practiced by women to summon animals and to frighten wild beasts. This chanting is employed as the leitmotiv of the entire research thanks to its capacity to evoke blankness and distance as well as the fragility and the force of the human condition in its loneliness and thrownness. Movement along with voice become tools for investigating the human feeling of anguish, the constant tension between mania and exhaustion, eroticism and boredom, desire and dejection.

Tutto sarà com’è ora, solo un po’ diverso

The Garden is the garden of earthly delights, of forbidden aspirations, an artificial paradise still to do. According to a rabbinic parable, beloved by Walter Benjamin, in the messianic world things are as on earth but just a bit shifted from their mundane position. The degree of this shift, the littlest swing that would achieve paradise on earth, is not given to us. The performance aims to investigate the measure and the value of this displacement through a choreography of gesture and postures, on which is grafted a vocal score written in collaboration with Sara Bertolucci. A crucial aspect of the dramaturgical research is, in fact, the Kulning, a traditional Swedish chant practiced by women to summon animals and to frighten wild beasts. This chanting is employed as the leitmotiv of the entire research thanks to its capacity to evoke blankness and distance as well as the fragility and the force of the human condition in its loneliness and thrownness. Movement along with voice become tools for investigating the human feeling of anguish, the constant tension between mania and exhaustion, eroticism and boredom, desire and dejection.