Francesco Marilungo is a choreographer and dancer that Danae has been following since his debut. Over the years, he has worked as a performer with various artists such as Enzo Cosimi, Antonio Marras, Jonathan Burrows/Matteo Fargion, and Alessandro Sciarroni, while starting his own career as an author. Winner of the Premio Prospettiva Danza Teatro 2020 for his play Party Girl presented at Danae in the same year, for this new work Marilungo has delved into the subject of mourning cry.
Mourning is no longer a communal act but an individual condition. Yet, we constantly experience the death of someone or something, losses are so close to us, so numerous and diverse that mourning becomes an existential condition, a sort of diffused melancholy we cannot elaborate no matter how present it is in our lives. The only possible reaction is crying. And then we cry without a reason, as if mourning were an inevitable stage of our existence. So, without an apparent reason, the five performers of Stuporosa first hold back their lament, then stifle it, then again turn it into music or chants. They are the pathos formulas, or pathosformeln, described by the great anthropologist Ernesto De Martino in Morte e pianto rituale. They try to resume a rituality, to offer new forms of mutual aid by murmuring ancient magic formulas, evoking traditional dances, singing a lullaby from Salento.
The play features the four outstanding dancers Alice Raffaelli, Barbara Novati, Roberta Racis, Francesca Linnea Ugolini together with the musician and performer Vera di Lecce, who accompanies the work with live music.