When we speak of “theatre records,” can we refer to a canon, a dominant tendency, a truly recurring mode of production? The answer, in reality, is quite simple: no. Too heterogeneous are the forms, genealogies, and performative trajectories that the record, each time, summons. And perhaps this is precisely its most interesting quality: to elude overly neat classifications, to sabotage the idea of a stable form, to resist any normative temptation that feels too reassuring.

Within this jagged landscape, the "soundtrack" mode would seem to represent the most obvious case, the most domesticated form. A performance almost always produces its own music or sound, later fixed on a medium, and the passage from stage to record would appear to unfold without particular reinvention: a transcription, or little more. But it is precisely here that the apparent conventionality begins to crack. Because when sound possesses a powerful dramaturgical density, the record ceases to be a simple derivative of the scenic event and offers itself as an artistically autonomous object, capable of retaining and relaunching the same imaginative world without merely illustrating it.

This is the fortunate case of redrum by Bruno Dorella, a vinyl released last year by Subsound Records, soundtrack – as the subtitle states – of the eponymous "performative project" by gruppo nanou. The work, winner of the Premio Ubu 2024 as best dance performance and still present in the repertoire of the Ravenna-based company, will be on stage on 29 and 30 April in Florence, at Cango, as part of the festival La democrazia del corpo. And it is also in anticipation of this important occasion that we find it fitting to dwell today on the record: on a work that, let us say it plainly, does not merely document the performance, but prolongs its life in another form, with its own necessity of listening.

The album strengthens a collaboration that has become structural between Nanou and Dorella, a musician well known in the Italian rock-avantgarde-industrial scene for his involvement in groups with a strongly theatrical identity such as OvO and Bachi da pietra. The partnership was born in 2019, later refined in 2022 with Paradiso, a "Dantesque" record conceived for the eponymous choreographic work by Marco Valerio Amico and Rhuena Bracci. redrum thus consolidates the collaboration — one that does not correspond to a simple external commission, but is rather the outcome of a prolonged exchange, matured through Dorella's relationship with the choreographic figures and the bodies of the dancers. In this sense, Paradiso and redrum end up composing a kind of diptych: a sonic-performative constellation in which the record does not arrive "after," as residue or derivation, but develops alongside the scenic work as its lateral double, its dark twin.

It is also for this reason that filing redrum under the label of "soundtrack" is accurate only up to a point. Granted: we are in the realm of original music written for a performance. And yet, here the term risks being reductive, because it suggests an ancillary, almost illustrative function. In redrum, by contrast, the music participates in the construction of the perceptual apparatus on equal terms with light, space, and body.

To fully understand the record as an artistic operation, one must return to the performance, inspired by the Kubrickian universe of The Shining, where the cinematic sensibility — beyond that atmospheric quality, at times almost Lynchian, that has run through several of Nanou's works — becomes the threshold of access to an immaterial place, a diffuse unsettlement, a kind of sensory architecture in which dream, memory, and apparition brush against one another without ever fully coinciding.

In its performative form, redrum is more precisely an open-ended choreographic installation. There is no rigidly prescribed beginning or end: the spectator enters, exits, moves, chooses their own position, modulates the duration of their stay. It is a configuration that disrupts the frontal idea of vision and replaces the centrality of the stage with a mobile geography of the gaze, made of pauses, crossings, proximities, ever-shifting perspectives.

It is here that, across the various locations in which the performance has so far taken shape, the most concretely descriptive elements of the scene become decisive. The red room, the doors opening onto other spaces, the play of mirrors and reflections, the perspectival vanishing points, the backlighting, the low and muffled spotlights: everything contributes to generating the impression of an interior that is at once sumptuous and spectral. This is a suggestion evoked also by the record's cover, with its vivid colours shifting toward magenta red and that fragment of golden, damascened fabrics, as if one found oneself mentally projected into a luxurious and decadent hotel traversed by residues and ghosts. The figures that appear and disappear, punctuated by light choreographies that never push toward the athletic, are not characters in the dramatic sense of the term: they are presences, silhouettes, bodies that traverse the space in a sinuous and intermittent way. The scenic writing does not develop through a concatenation — let alone a narrative one — of events, but through densifications, rarefactions, shifts of intensity. Within this performative flow, Dorella's music is not bent toward commentary, but is rather the medium that makes possible the very consistency of the environment.

All of this is clearly perceptible in the album as well, which tends to transfer into listening the same perceptual logic. The tracks do not construct a narrative progression; they prefer to install a nocturnal atmosphere, to hollow out a cavity, to let the imagination orient itself within a system of sonic corridors. Dorella's musical vocabulary combines electronics, pulse, low frequencies, rarefied instrumental emergences, and a general opacity that avoids both the monumental and the decorative. Rock, though present as an energetic spectrum, remains almost always restrained, filtered, skeletal, rendered atmospheric. It is a sound that winds, insinuates, builds pressure; and that, precisely for this reason, renders the space of listening inhabitable on multiple levels.

The track titles are revealing of the Kubrickian horizon: Grady, Lloyd The Barman, Hallorann, Gradys Twins, Room 237. Recognisable signals scattered along the filmic journey of The Shining, but used with intelligence, without becoming mere fetishistic references or banallycitationist ones. They are rather triggers of meaning, mnemonic traces, small thresholds that orient listening toward different gradations of the uncanny without ever imprisoning it in a univocal reading. And this evocative strategy is perfectly coherent with the poetics of Nanou, always interested in defining an alphabet of movement that is subtle, sober, technical but never technicistic or muscular, in which virtuosity resides not in the display of the body, but in its capacity to inform the surrounding space and the spectator's perception.

One might say, then, that the most convincing achievement of redrum lies precisely in its double status. On one hand, it remains inseparable from the scenic writing from which it originates: listening to it, one clearly perceives that these sounds were born to dialogue with doors, corridors, shadows, apparitions, red surfaces, stillnesses, and traversals. On the other hand, the record does not suffer at all from its separation from the performance. On the contrary, it gains a further margin of autonomy. Those who have experienced, or will experience, redrum live will find in it the sensory quality of that landscape; those who have not yet done so will have no impression of standing before an incomplete residue, but before a finished work, capable of generating its own interior scene.

And this is perhaps the most stimulating point, also for the small anthology of theatre records that this column is ideally composing. If, as noted at the outset, the soundtrack is only apparently the most conventional form of the relationship between stage and record, in cases such as this it reveals itself to be one of the most insidious and complex. Because it compels one to ask where the performance ends and where another object begins; how much of the dramaturgy can migrate into sound alone; and in what way the record can continue to be, after the run of the performance and in its absence, a genuinely performative device. redrum answers these questions with its own elegant darkness: it does not reduce the stage to a relic, does not transform it into a souvenir, does not make of it a simple shelf vinyl destined for collecting. Rather, it opens a new space of traversal. Could we call it an "Overlook Hotel for ears alone"? Yes, that too; but with the not insignificant advantage that here the ghost is above all the music. And, as often happens with the most dangerous spirits, once they have entered the house they are in no hurry to leave. Not even from the turntable.