Fuga Pasolini_ The Dance of 1922

a training project towards creation, by Virgilio Sieni

... On the other side of the dusty, sewage covered road, there was another house: this one in stone and built on a platform. Upon this platform, right across the threshold, lay an old woman. She seemed practically nailed to the stone. As occurs in nightmares, it seemed she wanted to get up but couldn’t. She was clearly in agony. As skinny as a child,  muscles tautened by her poor contracted nerves, she lay supine, her  neck upon the stone, her head shaking from side to side ...
Pier Paolo Pasolini, L’odore dell’India

Starting with the initial act of  leaving one land behind, embarking on an exodus to a new world, and fleeing one’s enemies, the piece goes on to explore how the experience of ‘Otherness’ through the proximity of other bodies engenders solidarity, mutual support and care.
It is a portrait of a community on the move, propelled forward on a journey without end or rest: an odyssey within which a myriad of gestures is encapsulated, each to be discovered and explored in all its beauty and finest detail. These are the gestures of people and faces that bear witness to the gradual process of change in human posture and demeanor over centuries. The primordial landscape of human faces, rendered here through the action of the performers, evokes the idea of a physical landscape opening itself up for the inspection of a film location scout on the lookout for the ideal setting for a film about exodus.
I asked a wide range of people - dancers, amateurs, elderly citizens, young citizens, women, men, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters to donate their time to explore the experience through bodily movement and expression.
The guiding hand of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s leads us along the unconventional and unexpected pathways of the human body. Mapping the contours of the human gaze and the encounters between people from whose very difference communities are built, he unleashes before us, with penetrating detail, realities that demand to be heard, to linger, to last, demand light.
Pasolini was born in 1922 and this performance is intended as a simple conversation touching on the myriad journeys and paths he followed during his lifetime.
Virgilio Sieni