In the neoclassical setting of the Ridotto of the Valli Theater, Redrum / Through the Looking Glass by the Nanou takes on a Gothic-Baroque guise that transfigures the space into a forbidden, ancient place.

In the neoclassical setting of the Ridotto of the Teatro Valli, Redrum / Through the Looking Glass by the nanou group takes on a Gothic-Baroque guise that transfigures the space into a forbidden, ancient place: every frieze, every molding, every ornamental lamp on the walls becomes a palimpsest of a restless imagination. The lights, stretched like endless arches, accentuate the deep shadows, create fissures in the vault, suspended between ancient and modern, fuel the feeling that the viewer is entering a place that does not exist but inhabits memory.

Redrum is the first chapter of nanou Group's multi-year Overlook Hotel project. The title recalls The Shining, the iconic density of Kubrick 's film, and evokes an emotional territory of subtle ghosts, of fleeting memories, of intertwined dream and desire. But here what is revealed is the unspoken, the emotional residue, the liquid boundary between reality and vision. In this Redotto, stage and stalls cancel, the choreographic installation with five dancers and a performer transforms the space into a moving organism. The spectator does not sit on the edge, but is inside, is traversed, as if the theater becomes a body to be explored. The choreographic action breaks through the barriers of the conventional stage, mixing the real and the improbable, inviting each spectator to a mobility of gaze, body, and thought. The dancers' technique, rigorous, almost ascetic, becomes the engine of a rarefied physicality. No excess, the virtuosity is internal, metabolized in the rhythm of the bodies. The interaction between the performers generates an unstable topology, a constellation that forms and dissolves in an incessant cycle. In this context joint twists, isolation, purposeful contractions, ground waves and verticality are addressed with continuity. The dynamic variations between stasis and momentum, between horizontal body plan and vertical thrust, translate into gesture that gap between what appears stable and what wavers, between surface of appearance and psychic depth. The internal listening to gesture, the mathematical repetition that becomes obsession, the desynchronization that challenges the eye and forces it to recalibrate perception, these are the faces of choreography. The relationship with space is almost ontological: the dancers do not inhabit the scene, they continuously create it, as if light itself depended on their presence.

The light design, curated by Amico, responds to the tensions of the space: ornamental lamps become latent sources, interlocking patterns of light that furrow walls covered with almost Baroque tapestry, drawing arabesques of shadow; punctual beams that isolate individual bodies and then, in the same instant, dissolve those figures into shared darkness. Gothic lights do not celebrate decoration, they evoke it, revealing lines of flight, visual scratches, unexpected depths. Rhuena Bracci's costumes, understated but evocative, blend with the hues of space, become reflective skin of light. Fabrics that absorb and return liquid tones, imaginary velvets, surfaces that bend to the oblique angles of the gaze, neutral, absorbent, almost epidermal. In this objectless universe, every fiber, every breath becomes a plastic sign. The group works on the micro-choreography of attention, the detail is amplified, the minimal gesture is taken to the limit of visibility, and the viewer is forced into an act of active viewing, like someone peering through a porthole.

Bruno Dorella's sound, with dark frequencies, resonances that echo like an echo, adds not accompaniment but sound pressure that modulates the body, that renews its gesture. The architectural space, the walls, the friezes, are not background but choreographic matter: the performers penetrate them, brush against them, make them the scene of a suspended ritual. The boundary between true and false dissolves, not by emptying but by permeation: the scenic image is composed before our eyes in a unique, unrepeatable way.

In the end there remains the echo of gesture, the memory of the body, the trace of sound, the persistence of shadow. Redrum is visionary writing, not just gesture, but space and light, memory and vision, non-telling, refraction. With its usual aesthetic coherence, gruppo nanou continues to delve into language, to restore its alchemical quality to the scene.