In the national landscape of performing arts, Ravenna is a unique case. The city is home to numerous theater and dance companies, often recognized not only at the national level but beyond. As a result, a certain healthy nomadism is required to witness the premieres of our groups, following festival geographies that are increasingly less defined by the idea of “centrality.”
In Trentino, specifically at the remarkable Dro festival, we witnessed the latest work by gruppo nanou, a company that lingers on the boundaries between theater and dance. Their performances shape a space inhabited by bodies—those of Rhuena Bracci and Marco Valerio Amico—while still allowing the emergence of a non-linear language. Together with the sound research of Roberto Rettura, this heightens the perception of a stage that constantly eludes definition.
One must adopt an active stance—listening to movements and seeing sounds—because the stage appears as an enigma, a temporary coincidence of figures that the mind is called upon to grasp. Motel explores the relationship between a man, a woman, and their living room table, a kind of passage “through the looking glass” that generates non-everyday scenarios.
From the very start, it feels like watching cinematic sequences in rewind: falls and descents as if a black hole in the floor were pulling in every source of energy, the carpet being sucked into the furniture, the man crawling under the table only to emerge as the woman. Yet, some “situations” do unfold: he sits while she lies half-naked, as if after an act of violence; both lie on the carpet, gazing at the horizon as the sound of seagulls plays; or they sit across from each other at the table, waiting for something to happen.
The motel room is introduced by a figure wearing a top hat, unfurling a scroll with phrases seemingly addressed to us (“All of this has been prepared for you. Remember me.”), while a red-haired woman appears behind a white backdrop. The subtitle Faccende Personali (Personal Affairs) hints at an intrusion—indeed, we are projected into an intimacy we cannot (and perhaps should not) fully decipher.
Sound remains one of the few elements tied to mimetic reality (the crumpling of paper, the murmur of a radio, the clatter of dishes in a diner) in a scene that aims to evoke a “color,” shifting resolution, delaying and dissolving events into lingering traces in the air.
This is the first room of a project that will include two more—a kind of antechamber that stimulates both anticipation and analysis, driven above all by the enigmatic figures that appear for fleeting moments. It is as if we were looking through a cube of ice: the perspective blurs despite the clarity of the surface, leaving the mind with a stretched, wavering perception. Yet, it cannot discern the contours of reality beyond the cube, stopping instead with a hunger to share in the whirlpool of obsessions contained within that Motel room.