ILIADE #2 Knees

Franco Acquaviva

ILIAD #2 Knees - dramaturgy, imagoturgy Francesco Pititto

There is no representation here, only a scroll of human gravestones, of short living epigraphs of bodies that strip naked as an extreme form of affliction, or perhaps of liberation (the long sequence of the washing in the small bathtub of Creusa-Lorenza Guerrini).

The generosity of Lenz's performers is always striking: it's not an exuberant athleticism, theirs; nevertheless, they submit to physical scores and actions that seem like penances and are florilegio. The dives in the tub; the descent of the steps on your back and upside down by Elena-Sandra Soncini.

Things, however, with the soul, become men (and women) subjected to a violence that strips them of humanity; but “the soul is not made to inhabit a thing (…) who knows what effort it takes for it at every moment to conform to this, to twist and fold itself”.

Valeria Ottolenghi

Transportable cages, an infinite amount of white fabrics occupying the shelves, with others stained with blood, a show/installation of intense images. The seconds scroll several times on the screen from 08 and 46 to zero, when breathing is made impossible, with the presence of sensitive actors, in large numbers the names of Priam, Hector, Troilus, Paris. Between one and the other pale knees that bend with difficulty, perhaps a surrender, or a prayer. Hecuba with large breasts, almost an original figure of motherhood, has her feet and wrists wrapped in the fur of the she-wolf, the bitch, whom her children invoke several times, ready to curse Elena, the cause of so many bereavements. She too is unhappy, and will end up on the gynecological table, then carrying the bags to enclose the dead, the bloody fabrics, finally, as if sliding down the steps, making Floyd's words his own (George, ed.), with the request for help, a torment that had moved the world, a common sensitivity also similar to the parentheses identified by Weil in the Homeric poem of bloody battles (...). For Cassandra, a noisy flirt, the final scene is in absolute silence, truly heartbreaking because she cannot finally say goodbye to her brother Eleno, to lock him in that black container, feeling rather the need to wrap him in pitiful affection, kissing him gently over and over again. Applause!

Francesca Bortoletti

"About ILIAD#2 Knees, I am still accompanied by the relationship between the bodies on stage and the Giorgio Canuto Hall of the University of Parma, configured as an anatomical amphitheatre. A space historically conceived for the body to be exposed to the gaze, studied and interrogated, becomes here the place where that same body is no longer just an object of knowledge, but a living presence, traversed by history, violence and the possibility of ‘pietas’. It was this dialogue between place and scenic action that was the key through which I went through the experience of the show. Interpreters inhabit the space with an intense and rigorous presence, making gesture a language capable of suspending the story to allow a more essential dimension to emerge, in which the body seems to preserve a memory that precedes the words.

In the anatomical amphitheater, the arrangement of space constructs a precise relationship between the body exposed at the center and the community of observers: a relationship in which the gaze is called to become an instrument of knowledge. 'Knees' seems to reverse this dynamic. The body is no longer exhibited to be understood, but offers itself in its vulnerability, and the gaze is not called to produce knowledge or formulate a judgment, but to allow itself to be questioned by the vulnerability of the other."