…To sing in truth is quite a different breath. A breath of void. A gust in the god. A wind.
R.M.Rilke
This performance is dedicated to Jean Cocteau and to Nick Cave, the living Orpheus.
I do not fear the abyss. In it I descent. I risk. I go there I do not know where. Through the looking-glass. I descend. I look at you. Now in the violence of the instant that holds, I sense, I see the nakedness of the face, the being without protection, the terror of the unveiling. I will not have you, now I know. Never.
Now I can go back. There, where my sad song enchants and pervades, there in the space of desire, in the petit bourgeois dining rooms – waiting and departure dining rooms – on the dazzling stages, to be devoured by gazes…
Orpheus, the mythic, the gloomy rockstar of the inter-world unbalances our certainties, living in symbiosis with the here and now of theatre and the interval: the deep nothing of the unexpected.
All explodes on Eurydice’s death: a tormented and melancholic blues spreads throughout the room…then a thick and sound silence, emptying the stage and the soul alike. The performance starts: the dissolution of the hero. The deep and lonely time of loss, embraced by domestic walls, is slowly deconstructing, becoming dream/nightmare/obsession which progressively erodes the dividing line between visible and invisible: between theatre and cinema.
All dips and shatters until Orpheus inevitably descends towards Eurydice, towards death…or both? Then the encounter.
…Reaching the Desert where the absence of any relationship dwells, where the immense void becomes even more void: there you need to kill the friend or let yourself being killed, to recognise and prove his/her presence. Here is the pure relation.
THIS MOVEMENT IS THE RISK ITSELF.
The word is wrapped up between the violence which causes death and the enchantment of the impossibility of death, between the VIOLENCE OF ORPHEUS’ YEARNING DESIRE – causing death – and ORPHEUS’ EXTREME PASSION, MAKING HIM FOREVER DEAD.
In the space of this double violence, which seems to appease briefly, as a pure unmoving movement … ORPHEUS GLANCE dwells.