Lady Shakespeare

Opera retablO

Lady Shakespeare is a show that springs from the need to bring to the stage the great female figures present in the work of William Shakespeare, exploring with depth and sensitivity the complex relationship that binds women to power in its many facets: power exercised with firmness and determination, power endured in silence and resignation, power yearned for with passion and ambition, and power fought against with courage and tenacity, often at a great price.
The project is deeply rooted in the urgent and burning themes that shake and question contemporary society, recognising in the words of the Bard an extraordinary ability to speak to the present with a voice that remains surprisingly relevant. The show focuses in particular on gender discrimination, systematic oppression, everyday abuse and the misuse of power that continue to mark the lives of many women in the world today. Shakespeare’s female protagonists thus become far more than simple literary characters: they are transformed into bearers of a disturbing and uncomfortable contemporaneity, capable of unsettling consciences and opening up urgent and necessary reflections on dynamics that, centuries later, still struggle to be overcome.

Ho(Me)

Giselda Ranieri & Corps-Citoyen

HO(ME) is a project that moves at the intersection of dance, theatre and music, built and developed in constant dialogue with the local communities of the territories in which it takes shape. It is not a show in the traditional sense of the word, but rather an open, participatory and continuously evolving creative process, one that feeds on the encounters, the stories and the voices of the people it inhabits and passes through.

At the heart of HO(ME) lies the concept of home, understood not only in its physical and material sense — the walls, the rooms, the objects, the tangible boundaries of an inhabited space — but above all in its symbolic, iconic and deeply intimate dimension. Home is the place of memory and identity, the place one returns to and departs from, the space in which one seeks refuge or from which one flees. It is a concept that carries within it emotional, cultural and anthropological layers of extraordinary complexity, capable of touching universal chords while expressing itself in radically different ways for each individual and each community.

It is precisely because of this inexhaustible complexity, and in order to do justice to the richness of meaning that the concept holds, that we have chosen not to limit ourselves to the word “home” but to turn instead to the notion of LOCUS. The Latin term refers to a PLACE that is not merely physical or geographical, but that extends and expands to encompass conceptual, literary and imaginary dimensions. The LOCUS is the inner space that each person carries within themselves, the geography of the soul built over time through experiences, relationships and memories. It is the place that exists even when it can no longer be reached, that lives in the mind and in the body even after its material traces have disappeared. To work around the LOCUS means therefore to open up a vast territory of artistic and human exploration, in which dance, music and theatre become instruments for inhabiting — if only for a moment — those inner places that rarely find room in the flow of everyday life.

M² – in 50 minutes

Dynamis

After two years of in-depth research and artistic exploration revolving around the M² performance, the Dynamis collective brings to life a broader and more ambitious work that expands, deepens and reimagines the themes, the dramaturgical structure and the scenic language that characterized the original project. This new chapter represents both a natural evolution and a radical rethinking of what came before — a gesture of artistic courage that chooses not to rest on the results already achieved, but to push further, to ask new questions and to open new territories of investigation.

At the heart of this work lies a pragmatic and yet profoundly poetic wonder about the unit of measure from which it takes its name: the square meter. What does a square meter contain? What can it hold, what does it exclude, what does it define? The square meter is at once a neutral, mathematical, bureaucratic notion — a cold instrument of measurement used to quantify space, to assign value, to draw boundaries — and a deeply human concept, charged with meaning, history and emotion. We live our lives within square meters: we sleep, love, argue, dream and grieve inside spaces that can be measured, bought, sold and taken away. And yet no measurement can ever fully capture what a space truly means to those who inhabit it.

Through the scenic device constructed for this performance, the work explores the shifting and often invisible border between the human and the inhumane that space assumes in relation to a given context. The same square meter can be a home or a prison, a sanctuary or a cage, a stage or a battlefield — depending on who occupies it, under what conditions, and with what degree of freedom or coercion. Space is never neutral. It is always political, always relational, always charged with the power dynamics that govern who belongs and who is excluded, who is welcomed and who is pushed to the margins.

In this landscape, the audience is not a passive witness but the very essence of the performance itself, the living matrix from which all action is generated and sustained. Spectators do not simply observe — they participate, they activate, they become part of a collaborative game that unfolds between strangers. In the shared space of the performance, the boundaries between performer and audience, between individual and collective, between the familiar and the unknown, begin to dissolve. What remains is a temporary community of bodies and presences, brought together by chance and held together by the fragile but real bond of a shared experience — an experience measured not in square meters, but in the immeasurable depth of human encounter.

Tal-Ilma

Progetto Brockenhaus

It is the darkness, the death before the rebirth, the unexpected, the profound, the problem and the difficulty — these are the territories of human experience that we instinctively aim not to see, to deny and to avoid. We build our lives around the light, around comfort and certainty, constructing careful defences against everything that threatens to pull us beneath the surface. And yet it is precisely in those submerged, shadowed places that the most essential transformations take place. It is there, in the depths we fear most, that something old dies so that something new can breathe.

The project draws its inspiration from an ancient Inuit myth: the Skeleton Woman. In this primal and unsettling story, a figure cast into the ocean — rejected, forgotten, left to dissolve in the dark waters — is unknowingly pulled back to the surface by a fisherman who becomes entangled in her bones. The myth speaks of what we bury and what refuses to stay buried, of the parts of ourselves we cast away and the ways in which they find us again, demanding to be seen before they can be truly laid to rest. The performance takes this myth as its starting point and proposes a vision and a reflection about the path that a soul must face in moments of crack — those ruptures in the fabric of ordinary life that open without warning and reveal the abyss beneath.

Sparks of light emerge from the darkness — tentative, flickering, but persistent. A body regains life after a dull thud, pulling itself back from stillness with the slow wonder of someone who did not know they could return. A chant regains voice at the awakening from a choked dream, rising from silence like something that was never truly gone but only waiting for the moment when breath became possible again.

Two women evoke passages of life, of maturation, of death and rebirth. Two bodies inhabit one place, navigating the same space with the intimacy and tension of two souls sharing a single interior landscape. They make way for each other, they go along together, they lose each other and find each other again, drawn back by something deeper than intention — as if it were one woman encountering herself across time, meeting the self she was, and the self that waited patiently on the other side of the darkness, ready to be reclaimed.

Nick of the Abyss

Phoebe Zeitgeist

The work draws its inspiration from the ancient mediterranean legend of Colapesce, a story that has been passed down through generations along the shores of southern Italy and that narrates the extraordinary and deeply human journey of a young person gifted with an exceptional nature — the ability to inhabit the deep sea as naturally and freely as others inhabit the land. Cola is a figure who exists between two worlds, belonging fully to neither, and it is precisely this in-between condition that makes his story so resonant and so alive with meaning. Faced with an impossible choice, he must decide whether to surrender himself entirely to the depths, abandoning the world above in order to sustain it from below — a gesture of sacrifice that is also, paradoxically, the ultimate act of self-realisation.

The show is conceived in the form of an underwater ballad, a flowing and immersive dramatic form that allows the narrative to move with the rhythm and unpredictability of water itself — at times gentle and enveloping, at times dark and overwhelming. Through a rich weaving of visual and sound fascinations, the performance descends into the abyssal zones of being, those deep and largely unexplored regions of the self where identity, desire, fear and authenticity coexist in a fragile and shifting equilibrium. Just as the ocean floor conceals landscapes of breathtaking strangeness and beauty invisible to those who remain on the surface, so too do the innermost zones of a human life contain depths that ordinary existence rarely allows us to visit.

It is in this submerged world that the depth reveals to Cola the path toward the realisation of his own authenticity. The journey is not a smooth or painless one — it unfolds through conflict, through rupture, through the friction generated by his encounter with nature in all its indifferent power, with authority in all its demand for conformity and submission, and with other human beings in all their complexity, fragility and capacity for both love and betrayal. These three forces — nature, authority, humanity — become the coordinates of a dramatic landscape in which Cola must navigate without a map, guided only by the truth of his own exceptional nature and the quiet, persistent call of the deep.

A Thixotropic mixture like the blood of Saint Januarius

Antonino Talamo

Cosaltro Esperimenti is not a fixed show in the conventional sense, but a living and generative matrix — an open structure that produces a different musical experiment each time it is activated, shifting and transforming according to the specific location, the relationships that emerge between performers and audience, and the sound possibilities that each unique context makes available. It is a form that refuses to crystallise, that resists repetition, that insists on remaining alive and unpredictable. Every performance is therefore a singular and unrepeatable event, deeply shaped by the living tissue of the place and the moment that hosts it.

At the heart of this matrix lies a powerful ritual inspiration: the figure of San Gennaro, patron saint of Naples, known in the streets and hearts of the city by the tender and irreverent nickname of “yellow face” — a name that speaks not of reverence but of intimacy, of the deep and familiar relationship that the Neapolitan people have always cultivated with their protector. San Gennaro is not simply a religious icon in Naples; he is a living presence, a companion in joy and in suffering. And nowhere is this sense of collective belonging more powerfully expressed than in the ritual of the blood — that mysterious liquefaction that the city awaits each year with devotion, anxiety and fierce pride. The blood of San Gennaro belongs to the Neapolitan people. It is their pulse too.

It is from this volcanic spiritual inheritance that Cosaltro Esperimenti draws its deepest sonic energy. The music generated within this matrix is lava music — raw, primordial, unstoppable. Like lava, it moves according to its own internal logic, carrying within itself the heat of what lies far beneath the surface, burning through old forms so that new ones can take shape in the cooling aftermath.

The visual world of the performance is conceived by Federica Terracina, whose work in scenery and costume design brings a vision that is rooted in the cultural imagination of the Mediterranean south while remaining open to contemporary artistic languages. The historical and literary dimensions are guided by Francesco Andoli, journalist and consultant connected to Identità Insorgenti, whose presence ensures that the ritual and musical explorations of the project remain grounded in a serious engagement with the living history and cultural depth of Naples and its people.

Trilogia dei Riti
Accabai – Matrici – Sabi

Alessandra Asuni

Three crucial moments of one’s own existence, complementary one to each other, as the colors black, white and red which represent them, told in the outermost practices originated from an ancestral and mysterious land, as Sardinia is.

The project “Trilogia dei riti” (Trilogy of the rituals), was born in 2011, exploring the cycle life-death-rebirth through the feminine world. An experience that leads us back to the theatre.

“Accabai” is inspired by the figure of Femina Accabadora, the one that, until a few decades ago, when requested from the family, used to practice euthanasia to the dying person.

“Matrici” (Matrices) is inspired by the most sacred and common act of all, the act of birth.

The very last ritual, “Sabi”, is inspired by ancient treatments, either enchanted either of faith, where sickness is exorcised through a shared act of rebirth”. (quoting Nicole Jallin – http://bit.ly/2GrDnm0)

In 2011, Alessandra Asuni began an artistic journey with ACCABAI, a rite which gets her involved in an explorative project dealing with the cycle of life, death and rebirth portrayed by a female perspective. After the Antonio Landieri Award in 2013, her art grew stronger with the second rite, “MATRICI” ( the life), and the last one, SABI ( the rebirth).

This artistic wander evokes a ritualistic theatrical performance, with every rite holding each other while also being divisible and indivisible for the audience.
This work has both experimental and satirical characteristics: by acting it is possible to live, to bring an end to an experience and to think about the experience itself.

Asuni’s theatrical performance is closely linked with anthropology: her work touches ancestral feelings and develops into shapes and suggestions more “lived” compared to the simple act of staging.
The scene itself goes beyond the conventional space to envelop the surroundings: the “fourth wall” isn’t pulled down, it’s nullified “ex ante”.

Ushakova

Ohi Pezoume

This performance is part of the “UrbanDig_Ushakova” Project, developed by OP in 2018 and inspired by the figure of Gabriella Ushakova (1916–1991) — a prostitute whose life and presence in one of Athens’ most charged neighbourhoods became the unexpected seed of a broader and more complex reflection on time, space, labour and belonging in the contemporary city.

UrbanDig_Ushakova is simultaneously a research project, an artistic endeavour and a community practice rooted in Strefi Hill, in the heart of Exarchia, Athens. The project draws its inspiration from the life of Gabriella Ushakova, an emblematic sex-worker who lived and worked in Exarchia until the 1990s. Her figure carries within it a quiet but powerful provocation: «I have plenty of time», she used to repeat — a phrase that, on the surface, seems simple, even casual, but that reveals on closer inspection a profound and radical refusal. In those four words, Gabriella dissolves the boundary between free time and work time, between the hours that belong to us and the hours we sell, suggesting the possibility of a different relationship with time altogether — one that is neither productive nor merely leisure, but something shared, open and undivided. It is this vision of common time that lies at the very heart of the project, animating its research and driving its search for a spatial and artistic expression adequate to its depth.

Strefi Hill is chosen as the terrain for this exploration — a place that is itself a threshold, a space suspended between the ordered logic of the city and something wilder, more uncertain and more free. Both the space and the time of Strefi Hill are marked by discontinuities and cracks, by interruptions in the smooth surface of urban normality that allow other realities to become visible. It is precisely within these cracks — spatial, temporal, social — that UrbanDig_Ushakova locates its practice, exploring and actively enhancing the conditions under which common time and common space can be produced, inhabited and shared. The performance that emerges from this process is not a representation of the project but its living extension — a moment in which the ideas, the histories and the energies gathered through months of research and community engagement are given body, voice and presence.

Hydropanic

Giulio Escalona ft. Fiorella Camilleri

Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Plantae
Division: Bryophyta
Class: Bryopsida
Order: Rhizogoniales
Family: Altofest
Genera: Sonic Performance
Species: Giulio Escalona
Nomenclature: Hydropanic

Hydropanic is an immersive sonic project that takes its name from a carefully constructed and evocative tension between two words, two states, two worlds: the hydroponic — that modern, precise and wonderfully paradoxical practice of growing plants without soil, suspending life in liquid nutrients, coaxing nature to flourish in conditions of its own apparent absence — and the Panic, that ancient and overwhelming feeling of intense, unmediated participation with the surrounding natural world. The word Panic itself carries within it the name of Pan, the Greek god of wild nature, of forests and fields and the untamed energies that pulse beneath the surface of the visible world. To feel panic, in this deeper and older sense, is not to be afraid but to be consumed — to lose the boundaries of the self in the face of something vast and alive and indifferent to human categories.

It is in the fertile, charged space between these two poles — the technological and the mythological, the controlled and the uncontrollable, the liquid precision of hydroponics and the overwhelming immensity of Panic — that this project makes its home and conducts its investigations.

The artist works at the intersection of electronic music experimentation and a profound, almost shamanic attentiveness to the sonic life of the natural world. Through the use of sensors inserted directly into living plants, he listens to and amplifies the subtle, largely inaudible signals that move through organic matter — the electrical impulses, the biochemical conversations, the slow and continuous language that plants speak among themselves and with their environment. In a parallel gesture, he places microphones and transducers against the surfaces of stones, drawing out the resonances and frequencies that lie dormant within mineral matter, revealing that what appears silent and inert is in fact vibrating with a life of its own, speaking in registers that the unaided human ear cannot reach. These practices are not merely technical experiments but acts of deep listening — an attempt to extend the boundaries of human perception and to enter into genuine dialogue with forms of life and matter that exist beyond our usual frameworks of attention and understanding.

Raymond ”Fight” Beck

Teatru Malta

It is the darkness, the death before the rebirth, the unexpected, the profound, the problem and the difficulty — these are the territories of human experience that we instinctively aim not to see, to deny and to avoid. We build our lives around the light, around comfort and certainty, constructing careful defences against everything that threatens to pull us beneath the surface. And yet it is precisely in those submerged, shadowed places that the most essential transformations take place. It is there, in the depths we fear most, that something old dies so that something new can breathe.

The project draws its inspiration from an ancient Inuit myth: the Skeleton Woman. In this primal and unsettling story, a figure cast into the ocean — rejected, forgotten, left to dissolve in the dark waters — is unknowingly pulled back to the surface by a fisherman who becomes entangled in her bones. The myth speaks of what we bury and what refuses to stay buried, of the parts of ourselves we cast away and the ways in which they find us again, demanding to be seen before they can be truly laid to rest. The performance takes this myth as its starting point and proposes a vision and a reflection about the path that a soul must face in moments of crack — those ruptures in the fabric of ordinary life that open without warning and reveal the abyss beneath.

Sparks of light emerge from the darkness — tentative, flickering, but persistent. A body regains life after a dull thud, pulling itself back from stillness with the slow wonder of someone who did not know they could return. A chant regains voice at the awakening from a choked dream, rising from silence like something that was never truly gone but only waiting for the moment when breath became possible again.

Two women evoke passages of life, of maturation, of death and rebirth. Two bodies inhabit one place, navigating the same space with the intimacy and tension of two souls sharing a single interior landscape. They make way for each other, they go along together, they lose each other and find each other again, drawn back by something deeper than intention — as if it were one woman encountering herself across time, meeting the self she was, and the self that waited patiently on the other side of the darkness, ready to be reclaimed.

BACK PINK POEM: “for a cup of tea”

Chiara Orefice – Renato Grieco

The foundation of the entire creative process lies in the relationship with a domestic place — not as a neutral backdrop or a merely functional container, but as a living entity endowed with its own concrete and architectural structure, its own accumulated memories, and its own spirit. The domestic space is understood here in its fullest and most layered sense: as a physical reality of walls, floors, corridors and thresholds, but equally as a repository of time, of gesture, of absence and presence, of all the invisible traces left behind by the lives that have unfolded within it. To enter into creative dialogue with such a space is to accept that it is never empty, never silent, never purely material — it is always already inhabited by something that exceeds the visible and the measurable.

The creative process begins with an act of deep and patient listening. The reality of the domestic space is registered in both its acoustical and its physical dimensions — its resonances and reverberations, the way sound moves and transforms within its particular geometry, the textures and surfaces that absorb or reflect, the rhythms of light and shadow, the subtle presences that accumulate in corners and along walls. From this careful and sustained process of registration emerge feedbacks and resonances in the form of fragments: sonic and physical materials that carry within them something of the life and memory of the place, raw elements that bear the mark of their origin while already beginning to detach from it. These fragments are then selected, elaborated and transformed through a set of compositional principles that include repetition, loop, deformation and translation — processes that do not erase the original material but subject it to a kind of pressure and displacement, allowing new meanings and new sensations to emerge from what was already there.

Through this layered and rigorously crafted process, the aim is to create a domestic landscape that is simultaneously familiar and estranged — a space that the spectator can recognise and inhabit, but that has been subtly and irreversibly altered, tilted just enough off its axis to produce a productive sense of instability. The spectator is not invited to observe this landscape from a safe distance but to become an active part of it, to move through it and be moved by it, to allow their own presence to interact with the resonances and fragments that fill the space. In this way, the boundary between the real and the imaginary begins to blur and shift — a trip of fades between the concrete reality of the place and the imaginary plane generated by the experience of living within it, between what the space is and what it remembers, between what we bring to it and what it quietly, insistently gives back.

To Suit

Lizzie J Klotz

To Suit is an exploration into the rich and often startling world of animal courtship rituals, drawing unexpected and illuminating comparisons between the behaviour of humans and birds. Developed through a sustained and wide-ranging investigation into the nature of communication — verbal and non-verbal, conscious and instinctive, performed and sincere — the work comments on the social formalities that govern human interaction, on the elaborate codes and conventions we deploy when we wish to attract, to impress, to belong or to be chosen. Through the precise and expressive use of body, voice and sound, To Suit asks how different, really, we are from the birds who spread their feathers, perform their dances and fill the air with song in the ancient, urgent business of making themselves known to another. The bower bird constructs elaborate architectural displays to win a mate; the human being selects an outfit, rehearses a smile, chooses the right words. The peacock unfolds its extraordinary tail in a gesture of pure, unashamed display; we enter a room and feel the eyes upon us, and something in the body responds — straightening, expanding, performing. To Suit holds these two worlds in a gently ironic but genuinely curious dialogue, finding in their resemblance not a reduction of the human but an expansion of what we allow ourselves to recognise about our own nature.

Her days are marked by ritual.
She showers twice,
once in the morning and once in the evening,
and brushes her teeth whilst washing her hair.

She likes the way the shower tickles her tongue when she washes her mouth out.

She drinks two cups of coffee,
one cup of tea,
and one glass of wine
coffee for the morning,
tea for the afternoon
and wine for the evening.

But tonight, tonight is different.

Omertà

Matteo Marfoglia

Omertà is a code of honor that places importance on silence, non-cooperation with authorities, and non-interference in the illegal actions of others. It is an unwritten law, ancient and absolute, that has governed the internal logic of Southern Italian mafia organisations for generations — a law enforced not through written statutes but through fear, loyalty, and the suffocating weight of belonging.

The performance “Omertà” is danced by a female cast, inspired by the testimonies of women’s experiences of living and dealing with South Italian mafia society. It is a work which brings awareness to the position and the roles of the female figure within these organisations, and explores a route towards an unreachable freedom which some of those women look for all their lives, sadly realising there might not be one. These are women who exist in the shadows of a world that simultaneously depends on them and refuses to acknowledge them — mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, who carry the weight of a code they did not choose and from which there is rarely a way out.

My interest in creating this work was to investigate deeper into the role of those women, a role always characterised by its ambiguity and unclearness, and usually not acknowledged either by the general public or by the mafia organisation itself. But it was also, and perhaps above all, a desire to give them a platform to be heard and their stories to be told — to restore to them, through movement and presence, a visibility that the world has long denied them.

As Alessandra Dino, expert and researcher of mafia criminal organisations, observes, it is a role that has always been characterised by its ambiguity and confusion, trapped in a tangled spider web of feelings and emotions.

Secret Sound Stories

V XX ZWEETZ

Secret Sound Stories will explore the secrets behind the fading layers and the walled doors which once belonged to the glamorous and turbulent days of Strait Street — a place that once pulsed with music, desire, danger and life, and that now carries its history in its crumbling walls and half-remembered stories. Based on events which are told in George Cini’s “Strait Street, secrets and stories from behind closed doors”, local Maltese actors will present one-to-one performances of 10 minutes each, conjuring the glories, excesses and tragedies of “The Gut” — the most famous, most notorious and most beloved street in Valletta, a place that meant something different to everyone who ever walked its length.

Secret Sound Stories is an interactive, intimate and personal journey for individual listeners, designed to dissolve the boundary between the space being inhabited and the stories it holds. Our company writes stories inspired by images and works of art belonging to an exhibition space: they are told live by hidden actors who follow and observe the listeners without being seen, moving silently through the same rooms and corridors, present and invisible at once. The actors’ voices are transmitted live into wireless headphones, arriving as if from somewhere just beyond the edge of perception, giving life to a unique story — a delicate and carefully crafted fusion between poetry and sound which, for a brief and suspended moment, transforms the physical space into a parallel world of imagination, memory and quiet revelation. Each listener’s journey is their own, unrepeatable and entirely personal, shaped by the pace of their steps, the direction of their gaze, and the particular way in which a story, whispered directly into the ear, can open something unexpected in the one who receives it.

Hype

Frantics Dance Company

HYPE is a performance born from the desire to investigate one’s own behaviors, the relationship between the mind and the surrounding environment, and the shifting dynamics of being both alone and in company. It is a work that begins with the self — with the strange and largely unexplored territory of one’s own interior life — and expands outward into the web of relationships, influences and environments that shape who we are and how we act, often without our knowledge or consent.

The human body has gone through many changes during the story of time — physical, cultural, philosophical and psychological transformations that have altered not only what we look like but how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. In Greek philosophy, Aristophanes offered a mythological account of what and whom we are nowadays and how this transformation happened — a story of original wholeness, violent division and the perpetual, restless search for reunion that drives human desire and human connection. His vision speaks across centuries with surprising urgency, reminding us that the questions we ask about identity, belonging and transformation are not new, but ancient and enduring.

And yet the body we inhabit today carries with it a peculiar and humbling paradox: our brain autonomously performs 90% of our actions in an unconscious mode, leaving only 10% of our behaviour to conscious decision and deliberate choice. We are, in a very real sense, largely unknown to ourselves — steered by processes we cannot see, shaped by forces we rarely examine. How would we reason, how would we live, how would we relate to one another if we managed to expand that 10%, to bring more of our decisions into the light of conscious awareness? Are we aware of our self-conscious hero, or is our conscious self in fact the hero we have been searching for all along? Who is truly in charge — and when?

Vivirè Aquì

//solucionesdramáticas// & Griselda Layño

On stage: Griselda Layño and woman
Mise-en-scène: Javier Cuevas
Text and Dramaturgy: Griselda Layño, Javier Cuevas y Tamara Brito de Heer
Filming: Miguel Morales
Photography: Tamara Brito de Heer
Movement Assistant: Carlota Mantecón
Lighting and technical direction: Carlos Ramos
Customes: Amuhaici Luis y Victoria Villar Saucedo
Introduction text: Clarice Lispector (A breath of life)
Recording studio: SuperstereO Recording Studio
Production: //solucionesdramáticas// y Griselda Layño

It is a revelation, a trial against the audacity to request an explanation, and a dance with life and death. The work takes as its ethical and aesthetic reference The Trial of Joan of Arc by Robert Bresson — a film of extraordinary austerity and moral intensity, in which a young woman stands before the forces of institutional power and refuses, despite everything, to surrender the truth of her own experience. Bresson’s Joan is not a saint rendered in golden light but a human being of flesh and stubbornness and faith, subjected to the cold machinery of judgment and emerging from it with her dignity not only intact but deepened. It is this image — of a body on trial, of a voice that will not be silenced, of an inner fire that no external authority can extinguish — that haunts and animates the present work.

A contemporary heroine is judged for questioning, from a place of love, the order of nature. Her crime, if it can be called that, is the refusal to accept what has been decreed — the insistence on asking why, on demanding accountability from a universe that offers none, on standing upright in the face of a loss that has no justification and admits no appeal. Like Joan before her inquisitors, she faces a tribunal that has already decided its verdict, and yet she speaks. She moves. She persists. Her dance is both a defense and an act of defiance — a way of inhabiting the unbearable with a grace that transforms it, if not into sense, then into something that can be witnessed and shared.

The premature death of a mother is an unfair event. It makes us think about time logic, The order of nature And the luck of those who are still alive. Why does somebody die without having to die yet? Why hasn’t one died already if it was meant to? Where is the mistake? Where lies the fault that has inverted the natural order of things? Who is to ask for explanations? Who can fix this injustice? I WILL LIVE HERE

Finding Malta

NG CHOR GUAN

Finding Malta is a live performance show that combines the language of the environment with the language of technology, weaving together the physical and the digital, the lived and the processed, into a single and immersive artistic experience. It is a project that moves through two distinct but deeply interconnected phases — an archival cycling process and an audiovisual performance — each of which feeds and enriches the other, creating a work that is simultaneously a document of a place and a transformation of it.

During the pre-production period, Ng Chor Guan, the artist behind the project, spends a minimum of five days cycling through specific areas of Malta, moving through the landscape at the particular pace and rhythm that only a bicycle allows — close enough to the ground to notice detail, slow enough to listen, open enough to receive what the environment offers. As he travels, he collects audio-visual footage that captures the textures, sounds, rhythms and atmospheres of the places he passes through — not as a tourist or an observer from a distance, but as someone in genuine physical dialogue with the terrain, feeling it through the body as much as recording it through the lens.

All footage collected is then artistically processed through the artist’s professional and creative vision, subjected to a rigorous and imaginative elaboration that transforms raw material into something new — something that carries the memory of the original place while opening it toward unexpected meanings and sensations. The final presentation of the art piece includes an audiovisual stage performance in which the bicycle itself becomes a musical instrument, its mechanical rhythms and physical presence integrated into the sonic and visual landscape of the show.

Audiences are invited to immerse themselves in this transformative performance, experiencing their daily living environment from a brand new perspective — discovering the familiar made strange, the overlooked made vivid, and the ordinary rhythms of Maltese life revealed as a source of beauty, complexity and wonder.