One of a kind. No other expression can so aptly describe the artist couple Gabriela Carrizo and Frank Chartier, aka Peeping Tom. She hails from Argentina, he’s French, and they met when they were both militantly engaged performers in Alain Platel's Ballets c. de la b. They eventually founded a company together, in Belgium, with the curious moniker Peeping Tom, which has already passed the twenty-year mark and influenced an entire genre with its unconventional language, defined through powerful physical narrative as an amazing blend of dance, theatre, acrobatics, cinematographic references and black humour.
The Diptych, which will have its Italian premiere at Oriente Occidente, is a remake of two pre-existing and successful short pieces: The Missing Door and The Lost Room, created for the Nederlands Dans Theater I, respectively by Carrizo in 2013 and by Chartier in 2015. For the first time, the choreographers will be presenting a completely renewed ensemble for this performance, co-produced by the Festival together with major world institutions.
The leitmotifs of both pieces are time, memory and premonition. In fact, the protagonists act out their own fiction. They’re extravagant, souls lost in time and space, driven by their innermost desires and often in spasmodic search of each other. The staging is a mixture of illusions and lost loves, a wandering path through the mind, the projections of which are effectively distortions of reality, all wrapped up in an oppressive atmosphere, with overtones of black humour in which primordial fears resurface. The set design – as is always the case with Peeping Tom – is fundamental to the dramatic rendering of the works and underpins the illusory nature of the characters’ lives, with its surreal doors and rooms. A fresco of everyone’s unconscious desires and utopias that pays tribute to the enigmatic and seductive cinematic style of David Lynch.
