Echo-soma, attuning to the air, placing a civil space
HYMNES 2024 POLVERIGI, ITALY
Let the Unusual Sensory Speak
The wind chooses the first line.It runs along the old monastery wall in Polverigi, catching on the stone like wool on a nail. Light thins to blue. The fountain keeps time nobody argues with. Pigeons stitch and restitch the sky. Nothing announces itself as “effect”. The place is busy already.
Hymns listens before it speaks. The building isn’t décor. It behaves like an instrument tuned by weather and people: wind, light, water, stone; memory, attention, the feeling of being looked at or left out. Put these in the same air and they start to play each other
A simple loop holds the evening together. A body moves; the world answers; that answer alters the next move. Echo, soma. Action, trace, action. You don’t need the term to feel it. A bare foot rasps the gravel and you hear the size of the space. A white strip of cloth lifts and you see the route of the wind. Your own shoulders adjust without being asked.
The score is spare. A man climbs a four-metre wall with no protection. The calf tremor becomes readable text. Balance fails, returns, fails again. Across the courtyard a woman watches a wall bright with the audience’s silhouettes, a soft lamp behind us making a shared image. She studies that moving crowd-picture, then washes her made-up face clean. Two times—then and now—sit next to each other without fighting for the lead. Plot feels unnecessary. The site arranges the relations.
Shape with Weather
Weather gives the cues. No secret switches, no reveal for its own sake. The light falls and contrast softens; detail slips and the eye admits it. A breeze rises and the cloth brightens; edges come back into focus. Sensation leads, meaning follows. You can call that affect-driven, or you can call it obvious: everyone knows how to read weather. Bodies are fluent.
To keep pace with this climate, the performance trusts real action. Not the sign for struggle, the work of it. Gravity, friction, pain, the small negotiations you make with risk. A sheet pretends to be a rope until fibres begin to part. A route changes by water. A hand finds the coping stone and earns a breath.
Nudity sits inside the question of being seen. It doesn’t ask for shock. It asks what fits: whose body the room was built for, who has to adjust to the inherited lines. That measure—quiet, exact—shows up like a watermark. Shame doesn’t leak from skin; it arrives when a body is compared to a rule.
Shadow and lighting rehearsal INTEATRO POVERIGI, IATLY
The Politics are Spatial
Attention is composed, not demanded. A soft light behind the audience folds their silhouettes onto the wall so that small shifts and breaths become a second layer the performers can read. Sound is de-centred—stone scrape, leaf hiss, water in the basin, the eye does not lock to a single point. Movement follows the monastery’s cross-routes, which is why performers pass through the crowd: the path leads to the wall.
Two planes meet. The height of the wall and the breadth of the yard settle into one shared surface in the image of shadow. Private acts turn legible in public. The loop closes: task makes trace, trace reshapes task. Structures that have fallen quiet—old orders, rules of looking, who stands at the centre and who is kept at the edge—become readable again, not argued but felt.
Many towns hold their past as backdrop while daily life moves to roads and retail. For one night the monastery works as a civic sensor. Background steps forward. Collective memory arrives as weather rather than lecture. Routes become visible: the outsider’s arc from square to wall, the held gaze, the choice to linger or leave. Such choices read as climate in the air.
The work draws on embodied archival research. Interviews, letters and images are not retold as plot but distilled into carriers anyone can share: a wall of shadow that can be read together, live acoustics that make small labour visible, currents of air felt on skin. In this frame the building is not a monument but a tool for noticing.
A few methods travel well. Tune light, air and temperature as dramaturgical levers. Set breath and task to the live climate. Keep the background in view so questions of fairness can be sensed before they are argued. Invite the crowd into composition with the simplest means: a lamp behind them, a wall ahead, time that is not hurried.
At night’s edge the fountain keeps counting. The pigeons settle. The lamp fades. People leave with the quiet knowledge that, for a while, they shared the same air under the same pressure. That fact already tells the story.