…maybe we cannot know the real reason why we are crying. Maybe we do not cry about, but
rather near or around. Maybe all our explanations are stories constructed after the fact.
— Heather Christle, The Crying Book
As Alfonso di Nola writes in La Morte Trionfata, mourning is the set of social practices and psychic processes aroused by the death of a loved one. In the past mourning was an aspect of social life, a complex system of shared gestures and tears which, through defined codes and ritual practices, allowed the individual to express pain with the support of the community. Today, in an atomized society, mourning has lost its community dimension to become an individual condition; the human being finds himself alone in front of a 'naked' death, a death devoid of the cultural and relational aspect which it had maintained for centuries. There is no longer the cultural institution of a funeral rite that allow you to overcome grief by elevating it, through the symbol, to a meta-historical level. There is no longer a community which can help you to process the pain. And yet, we constantly experience the death of someone or something, the losses are so close, numerous and varied - just think of the recent pandemic, the wars, the shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea... - that mourning becomes an existential condition, almost a sense of widespread melancholy which, although present, cannot be elaborated. The only possible reaction is crying. And then we cry unmotivated tears, as if mourning were an inevitable state of existence. Thus, apparently for no reason, the five performers of Stuporosa cry, giving life to a crying that takes on various nuances, now held back, now suffocated, now it becomes music, now it flows into hope, now it becomes a song tracing the sounds of an ancient Salento funeral lament.
Their bodies fragment in search of archaic, distant forms that are instantly lost and dissolved, as if they were suffering from a kind of anterograde amnesia, condemned to remain in a present that will never become memory, in a permanent inability to live in the here and now. These forms that return obsessively in an attempt to establish a sort of communication between the five individualities are the figures of pathos, the pathosformeln that Ernesto De Martino describes in the figurative atlas at the end of Morte e Pianto Rituale. Archetypal images of human suffering that have been handed down over time through centuries and civilizations, images belonging to past funeral rites but which have universal value because human beings have always suffered in the same way since they were created.
The five performers try to recover a sense of community, a ritual, to establish new forms of mutual aid, whispering ancient magic formulas, recalling traditional dances, singing a Salento lullaby. The lullaby and the lament, two closely related ritual forms. As the first accompanies children from wakefulness to sleep, so the second helps to facilitate the transition from the world of the living to the world of the dead. The link is so close that lullaby and lament are also associated in the songs and gestures of the mourners, who used the same melodies and the same movements that were used to try to put children to sleep. And it is no coincidence that in Barbagia the mourner was called s'attittadora, that means the woman who nurses and cradles the dead.
In Stuporosa, as in some ways happens in ritual weeping, you witness a stylization of pathos, a dehysterization. Tangently following the principle of pothos, a concept devised by Roland Barthes to illustrate a de-vulgarized pathos, you can perceives the constant tension towards a loss of control, towards a paroxysmal expression of pain which is however contained through a common choreographic code.
Francesco Marilungo. After graduating in Thermo-Mechanical Engineering and a research period in aerospace, he attended the DanceTheater Atelier at Scuola d’Arte Drammatica Paolo Grassi in Milan.
He continued his training as a performer studying with internationally renowned choreographers and artists such as Masaki Iwana, Claudia Dias, Gabriela Carrizo, Yasmine Hugonnet, Jan Fabre, Gisele Vienne and Romeo Castellucci. He worked as a performer with some artists including Enzo Cosimi, Antonio Marras, Jonathan Burrows/Matteo Fargion and Alessandro Sciarroni. Parallel to the activity as a dancer, he has begun his own authorial journey. Driven by the precision of RTC (Real Time Composition), he focuses his research on creating atmospheres as the result of the juxtaposition of images structured on multiple levels of representation. In his works he uses the body to investigate the archetypes of our culture with particular attention to the perturbing, to all that is connected to the interdict desire. With his works he is invited to various Italian festivals. With his project Party Girl he won Prospettiva Danza Teatro 2020 Award and was selected for Nid - New Italian Dance Platform 2020/2021.
