Zerogrammi, a Turin-based company founded by choreographer Stefano Mazzotta in 2005, has created twenty-seven productions to date. Over time it has become an extended family of playwrights, authors from various disciplines and performers involved, by their guide, in creative actions often based on literary or philosophical motifs, arising from their residency experiences in some singular places around Italy. Intense, sharp, often irony studded, Zerogrammi's productions are a journey through memory, into the suggestions stored by bodies shaped to perform “narrative” gestures, to a danced and dancing tale that expands into space. Their latest composite multimedia project Elegìa delle cose perdute (Elegy to lost things), featuring a medium-length film, photograph exhibition and dance piece, is faithful to this model. Oriente Occidente Dance Festival will host the film at two different times, with the attendance of the authors and the site-specific performance of six dancers in the Mart’s Sculpture Garden.
Inspired by I Poveri (The Poor), a bitter and raw novel by the Portuguese author Raul Brandão, peopled by outcasts grappling with unresolved existential problems, the project by Stefano Mazzotta and his group explores the theme of exile, the moral condition of individuals who feel estranged from the world in which they live, suspended between hope and nostalgia. During its gestation, the work was nourished by the performers' assimilation into a picturesque village, Settimo S. Pietro, in the province of Cagliari, where the company – during a stint in a residency programme - created both the performance and the film, the latter in collaboration with director Massimo Gasole. In the medium-length film, seven marginal and awkward figures, united by the same melancholic and nostalgic feelings, build up a desire for redemption. As they wander across the fascinating landscape of southern Sardinia, known as Campidano, on its endless white beaches and dunes, among the characteristic old houses, the natural spaces echo their souls, while distance and suspension establish a strained succession of images. Emptiness, vertigo, horizon. Things lost or which never were. The same tension runs through the choreography: a multiplicity of vectors and directions, abandonments and suspensions to the yearning notes of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Sad Waltz.
