Text outcome of a training course in collaboration with the University of Parma

redrum, UBU 2024 award for best dance performance, is part of the larger project Overlook Hotel by the Emilian collective Nanou. The title is a reflection of the word "Murder," which openly recalls The Shining, paying homage to both Stephen King's novel and Stanley Kubrick's famous film adaptation works that have always fascinated me as a great lover of cinema. The Shining recounts the drama of the Torrance family, forced to live in total isolation in a high mountain hotel, the scene of disturbing and supernatural events that drive the father Jack to madness, prompting him to manifest homicidal instincts. His son, little Danny, possesses an extraordinary extrasensory faculty, called shimmering (shining), which enables him to perceive the dark past of the place and to intuit future events.

redrum is a choreographic installation that involves various spaces of the theater and is enjoyed in a traveling dimension. At the entrance we receive a paper invitation with a few essential instructions: how to move and behave among the rooms, how to pause among the shadows, how to let oneself be traversed by the experience. If the viewer decides to drink, for example, he or she can do so at the counter set up in the first room, imitating Jack Torrance's hypnotic and disturbing gesture at theOverlook Hotel bar.

Five dancers and a performer inhabit three communicating rooms, with the audience freely traversing the passages, just as little Danny does in the corridors of the Overlook Hotel. The participants observe each other, follow each other, lose each other. One performer dons the role of the waiter/bartender; another repeats the gesture of Jack Torrance drinking, in a circular, desperate ritual. Redrum invites us to physically explore a world in which the boundary between true and false dissolves, allowing the stage image to compose itself before each gaze in a unique and unrepeatable way.

Two performers embody the twins, as immobile, mirror-like silent apparitions that seem to emerge directly from the memory of theHotel; one of them moves over a table in a room, another hides her face behind a curtain of hair, evoking the memory of the ghost of Room 237 (or 217 in the book), where youth and decadence, beauty and putrescence, desire and terror overlap in a single disturbing image. At times the five bodies assume the pose of the corpses that populate Danny's visions: still spectres, fragments of a suspended past. The lights cut the space and cast shadows that seem to be autonomous presences, fused by the rhythm of the music. The shadows amplify gestures, multiply them, transforming each body into a set of eerie visions.

redrum is not looked at: it is walked through. Like Alice stepping through the looking glass to enter a world turned upside down, we too found ourselves immersed in a territory where perceptions slip, identities refract, and the margin between the beholder and that which is being observed is obliterated.