nell’ambito di Città delle 100 Scale Festival

…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.

After graduating in Thermo-Mechanical Engineering and a research period in aerospace, Francesco Marilungo 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.

direction and choreography: Francesco Marilungo
with Alice Raffaelli, Barbara Novati, Roberta Racis, Francesca Linnea Ugolini, Vera Di Lecce
music and vocal coaching: Vera Di Lecce
space and light design: Gianni Staropoli
costumes: Lessico Familiare
photos and video: Luca Del Pia
production: Körper | Centro Nazionale di Produzione della Danza
co-production: Fabbrica Europa
with the support of IntercettAzioni – Centro di Residenza Artistica della Lombardia
with the contribution of Short Theatre Festival, Fuori Programma Festival, Teatro Akropolis & Dracma Teatro – Progetto CURA, Did Studio, Base Milano, Qenhun

photo: Luca Del Pia