in the country of last things: chapter 1
created in July 2022.
"In the Country of Last Things" stems from a hilarious anecdote involving a shopping cart, a sleeping child, and a mother without a stroller...
All that remained of the anecdote is the shopping cart: my aesthetic imagination brought flowers to it and my emotional memory, a statute of existence.
In this choreographic work, the cart assumed the meaning of transient tomb of the soul, a painful and transitory condition of the existence from which man cannot escape.
The shopping cart, manoeuvred in space, traces the battlefield in which the incommunicability of the two protagonists is consumed. "Armistice" and then, surrender, turns out to be the only possible way to pull themselves to safety.
And in turn, preserve the love that unites them.
Sometimes "the last thing" left to do in is hand out a “I watch over you” and wait for the grief to blossom into something more…
"Siamo solo conchiglie, sparse sulla sabbia. Niente potrà tornare, a quando il mare era calmo".
"We are only shells, scattered on the sand. Nothing can go back, to when the sea was calm", sings a voice in the background of their own...
in the country of last things: chapter 2
“Solo Choreo 2024”: VHS Stuttgart, 2024
"In the Country of Last Things: chapter 2", the protagonist has internalised the change/transformation that occurred during chapter 1, a necessary weight to bare.
If, from a Hegelian point of view, we can recognise in the two dancers a synthesis, a suffered dialogue with a painful antithesis, external to the two. Chapter 2 is the graduation of the dancers ascent to the state of synthesis, where change is no longer undergone but acted upon.
The trolley, further sculpted by her, contains herself and all consciousnesses achieved during her transformation. A container for the Last Things that were and all that has come.
The continual idea of plumbing the depths of meaning the 'last things' that remain possess, indicates the end of the world for the protagonist. An end, imposed by others, as a part of a very personal exploration of self-determination. An opportunity to explore the contradiction and the opposites present within oneself.
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An event organised, managed and promoted by Elena Cattardico, in collaboration with Francesco Ladron De Guevara.
An evening where Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of “In the Country of Last Things” was presented as a work in progress, alongside Francesco’s solo, titled “How Noisy is too Noisy?”
