Ritual is the first stage in the creation of Acqua acqua fuoco fuochissimo: a project for four male performers on the dynamics of construction and deconstruction of a male identity. In the title, the translation of an enchanted condition, ever balanced between the nearness and the distance of the models that accompany us yet at the same time from a dimension of intimate perception of self.
For this stage we are working on a form of open show, somewhere between script and improvisation. Convinced as we are of the impossibility of an absolutist definition of gender, we look at certain forms of masculinity in a way that is highly personal, bizarre, ironic and at times tragic.
Daily routines emerge, sketches of people lodged in our memories, males from our childhood or others perhaps encountered in the street who for some reason caught our attention. We support a listening network in which each inscribes his own poetic mark, his own story, in which each plays his own personal role to reconstruct his presence in front of the spectator as a possible male and reformulates his own idea of masculinity. We allow ourselves to be observed, facing the likelihood of making, or not making, a line of thought recognizable. The matching of results and expectations is variable, and it is in this space of variability that the human emerges; the tragedy and the comedy of his need to define himself in the eyes of others.
I think of this process as an exploration triggered by the experience of the body to open up different research tracks such as personal genealogy, silent fantasies, invisible forces or some idea of a stereotype to reach possible new representations of the male person, rooted in the originality of creation and in the value of presence at the moment of exhibition in front of the audience.
As in the reproduction rituals of gender forms, I think of the opening of a space of performative rituality within which the performers float along a narrow thread, balancing between truth and representation, definition and in-definition, action and contemplation to track down and exorcise freely the boundaries of their own identity.
Francesco Michele Laterza

Francesco Michele Laterza, actor and dancer. Graduated in Arts and Culture Management, he approached to theater attending a course at the Fondazione Pontedera Teatro, where he met Danio Manfredini, Cesar Brie, Roberto Latini, Silvia Pasello, Gay Pin and Raffaella Giordano. He has then studied with Raffaella Giordano in a two-year course of contemporary dance composition at the Teatro Stabile of Torino and L’Arboreto, Mondaino (Rn). He has continued his dance studies with the company Josef Nadj, Ambra Senatore, Malpelo, Giorgio Rossi, Les Ballets C de la B, Carolyn Carlson, Maria Munoz e Dominique Dupuy, and he has worked with Luisa e Silvia Pasello, Giorgio Rossi, Roberto Latini, Strasse and Teatro Valdoca.
Since 2013 he has worked with the company inQuanto Teatro and Leonardo Delogu. He is also co-founder of Famigliafuchè, a collective of young artists.
Since 2014 he has started a personal project of creation, Tristissimofranz and he has curated the atelier of research La palestra del gesto.

concept: Francesco Michele Laterza
by and with Simone Evangelisti, Francesco Michele Laterza, Fabio Pagano, Sandro Pivotti
sound: Danilo Valsecchi
dramaturg: Emanuela De Cecco
project winner of the call “Assemblaggi Provvisori” of Tenuta dello Scompiglio, Vorno (LU)
production: Tenuta dello Scompiglio, Vorno
promoted and supported by Anghiari Dance Hub
with the support of Sosta Palmizi, Kilowatt tutto l’anno

[photo: Fabio Artese]