as part of the Fabbrica Europa 2025 festival
There is a flutter of wings lost in the dark. A nocturnal creature drawn to the light, burning itself up. A story of a memory that won’t fade or perhaps never stops returning.
L’eco della falena (The moth’s echo) is a sensitive and ruthless meditation on the nature of time – not the measurable, linear kind, but a more intimate, internal time that flows through bodies and objects, that settles in the flesh and reverberates in everyday gestures. The time of memory, the time of loss, the time that stretches and breaks its flow.
Through a visionary and essential physical score, L’eco della falena tells of a woman enclosed in a space that is both a room and an interior world. Inside, memory takes shape, multiplies, shatters. Words are unnecessary: emptiness, ghostly presences, and unresolved echoes from the past are enough. The living matter is the body, an archive of experience, an unwitting keeper of pain and beauty. Memory becomes an unstable ground where ghosts, missed possibilities, and unspoken desires coexist. The moth, a symbol of fragility, of fatal attraction to what blinds, becomes the protagonist’s own transfiguration: caught in a struggle with the light of awareness, doomed to burn in the attempt to remember.
The first chapter of a trilogy inspired by Virginia Woolf, L’eco della falena is an invitation to lose oneself in the corridors of a dreamt memory, belonging to a nameless time, only to emerge again in that blind spot where the personal becomes universal.
A secular ritual where theatre becomes body, presence, breath.
Director and playwright Ciro Gallorano (b. 1988) trained at the Metastasio Theatre School in Prato from 2010 to 2013. In 2016, he began exploring the world of performance art, and in 2019 he started developing a personal artistic path focused on visual theatre and image-based dramaturgy. This led to his directorial debut, L’eco della falena, a production that received several accolades: winner of the 2020 Opera Prima Award, finalist at Direction Under 30 (2020), selected for In-Box (2020 and 2021), finalist at CrashTest Teatro Festival (2021), selected for “Differenti Sensazioni 2021/2022” – 34th International Performing Art Season, and for the 17th edition of The Black Box International Theatre and Dance Festival in Plovdiv. In 2022, he staged Ceneri, and in 2023 he began work on Crisalidi, which won the Biennale College Teatro Directing Prize for under 35s, awarded by La Biennale di Venezia. The show premiered the following year at Biennale Teatro.
With Cantiere Artaud, he creates works marked by an almost total absence of words, where body and space evoke powerful, archetypal visions.
concept and direction: Ciro Gallorano
with Sara Bonci, Davide Arena
production: Cantiere Artaud
with the support of Regione Toscana – Settore Spettacolo
with the support of MiBACT and SIAE as part of the “Per Chi Crea” 2018 programme
artistic residencies: Teatro Comunale di Bucine/Diesis Teatrango; Teatro Verdi di Monte San
Savino/Officine della Cultura; MiBACT – Regione Umbria – CURA – Centro Teatrale Umbro
Winner of the 2020 Opera Prima Award, finalist at Direction Under 30 (2020), selected for In-Box (2020 and 2021), finalist at CrashTest Teatro Festival (2021), selected for “Differenti Sensazioni 2021/2022” – 34th International Performing Art Season, and for the 17th edition of The Black Box International Theatre and Dance Festival
photo: Valentina Gnassi
