A vibrant post-bourgeois interior all in black and white-or, rather, imbued with the many shades of gray-a table and two chairs, a translucent setting founded on a single, direct central perspective. Then a multi-zoned space, burgundy sofas and armchairs. Here and there, great attention to texture, to the weave that makes the vision tactile.

These the First and the Second Room of the Motel by the nanou group, both traversed by the magnetic choreography of micro-actions-between minute solos and a few enigmatic pas de de deux, which seem to pose different emotional states-of a man and a woman(Marco Valerio Amico and Rhuena Bracci). This is not the first time the company's research has focused on the relational dimension; in fact, it could be said that it goes on to constitute, both thematically and linguistically, one of its hallmarks. But in this work, composed of three different episodes, the returning figures on stage - being declined, taken up or betrayed by the different Motel Rooms - go on to found some kind of macro-personages, whose identity seems decidedly broader than in the single performance. It is thus possible for the viewer, in the large "white spaces" left to the imagination, to go and trace their characters and functions, emotions and behaviors, in a process of comparison that is the subject of a continuous rearrangement of perspective.

Both episodes of Motel − the third and final one is still in progress − are built through a structure that reflects on narration and its absence; of course, it is not that the dimension of the story is not there, but its accessibility is continually postponed and questioned, only to be torn apart and chewed over by the action itself. The dramaturgical composition is very present − indeed its consistency is evoked, recalled and even stressed to the point of nailing down some flashes that would drag the actions towards evaporation − but it is as if its nodes could be intercepted only at the "wrong" (less pregnant or decisive) moments. As if the story that emerges from the rubble of the West were to be granted to the spectator in only partially significant traits: at the centre of the First Room there seems to be a chronic wait, albeit closer to the suspension of many of Hopper's paintings than to the theatrically traditional Beckettian reference; in the Second the emphasis is on a crime that has never been revealed, traces of catastrophes that no one has seen. The (alleged) key actions are denied above all through an editing underlined by a continuous coming and going of darkness − and when the light returns, it is as if something crucial has been lost, a turning point or a revelation fundamental to understanding the development of the scene, to the point of making Motel seem more like a sequence of juxtaposed polaroids than a flow of events.

But it is not only a dramaturgical device, and the subtraction of the narration is also realized at a performative level. In both Rooms the emblematic role of negation is openly delegated to an object − in the first a table, in the second a sofa − that repeatedly swallows the actions of the performers, even the (hypothetically) most important ones. Something is shown, suggested, unveiled and revealed, through some truly fascinating scenic solutions, such as the recovery of the events hidden by the sofa through a triple mobile mirror at the back of the stage, which certainly partly shows, but above all further hides, the identity of the action as in a painting by Bacon.
With these compositional and performative intuitions, together with what the company itself defines as "narrative residues", one can deepen a perspective on the contemporary scene: having overcome representation and post-drama, artists seem to have to deal with that rebirth of textuality that has been involving Italian stages for some years; but it is not a recovery of the dramaturgical dimension tout court, nor a dive into postmodern assembly devices, but rather perhaps a confluence of the compositional process in its spectacular rendering, a fusion between device and outcome, an acrobatic and sinuous movement that seems to bring together the representative dimension and the reality of the scene.

It would be simplistic to attribute the impulses of this work to the categories of image-theatre − of which it also retains notable elements, from the linguistic interweaving to the power of vision, up to a few moments in which the risk is that the iconic charm could be understood more as an exercise in style than as an attempt to relate to reality. In both episodes, in fact, a purely visual montage is not proposed, but the emphasis is placed on the participatory dimension of the spectator, also through moments of declared reflection on the substance of the performance: the First Room is inaugurated by a "hunchback" on which phrases such as "Welcome, this is the place you were looking for" flow, questioning the audience on the reasons why actors and spectators are there; the Second Room, on the other hand, is introduced by a modified voice, only understandable in tatters: "I don't want to wake you, but there's something you have to see". And it is precisely in these metatheatrical regurgitations, placed to inaugurate each of the episodes, that one can find an impetus that goes beyond the limits of what is recognized as image-theatre: alongside the scenic fiction nanou places the reality of the staging and the hermeticism of certain images, or of the references or of the triggers, dissolves into the enormity of a constitutively inaccessible mystery, in whose partial communicability both the artists and the spectators are accomplices.
This ridge of subversion of representative canons - which manages to turn a dramatic device into a performative line and then into a strategy of relationship with the public - is perhaps at the origin of the thematic approach of the Motel project: the violation of privacy, in peeking out onto the daily secrets hidden in the meanders of domestic space, is dedicated first and foremost to the spectator, who is clearly called to a participatory protagonism, through a dramatic score that continually puts his "external" gaze into crisis, between testimony and voyeurism.