la ultima vez

clandestine dinner

By Gabriella Salvaterra

Olfactory landscape Giovanna Pezzullo

Music Pancho Garcia

With Arianna Marano, Giovanna Pezzullo, Claudio Ponzana, Gabriella Salvaterra, Angela Sparvieri

Produced by SST Sense Specific Theatre – Artisti Drama

“When people gather around a table, they often talk about their lives, but I don’t understand why they almost always talk about their first times. Tonight, I propose the opposite: to remember and celebrate the last times in our lives, because for me they are the most beautiful and the most important.”

La ultima vez goes beyond the traditional boundaries of theatre, integrating food, storytelling, music, and the memory held in our bodies into a poetic experience. The starting point of this proposal is the idea that “we are nothing but a multitude of moments that no longer exist… yet somehow still do.”

The performance invites us to explore, with curiosity, the corners of our memory, searching for moments that deserve to be celebrated, no matter how small they may seem. This work is the heir to the research that Gabriella Salvaterra developed for many years with Teatro de los Sentidos, investigating the relationship between taste and memory, and the simple yet profound rituals that shape our lives.

reviews

One characteristic of Gabriella Salvaterra’s poetics appears particularly evident: as an artist deeply
rooted in sensory theater, her performative installations in enclosed spaces consistently present a
clear and recurring geography of places and images that tend to return.
While immersed in the darkness of La Ultima Vez (Clandestine Dinner), presented within the
Misma Onda program at the Oratorio San Filippo Neri in Bologna, we reflected on how the artist
manages to be always the same and always different…
Her current work continues to challenge theatrical conventions, proposing experiences that actively
involve the audience and focus on the transformative potential of art.
The audience, as always in her devices, is not a mere spectator but becomes an integral part of the
narrative, traversing an emotional and sensory path that blends darkness, light, and symbolic
gestures. This performance amplifies the symbolic moment of the shared table. The idea seems to have
originated and developed in Chile, from the universally shared difficulties of presenting works within performing arts festivals. Salvaterra therefore began hosting performative dinners in her own home, which became the basis for this creation, now able to welcome around twenty participants…
Her ability to involve spectators in an intimate and participatory way remains a critical response to
the distance and fragmentation that characterize contemporary society. Salvaterra demonstrates a
rare ability to use theatrical tools to move beyond representation, creating experiences that linger in
the spectator’s memory like fragments of a collective dream.

Renzo Francabandera, paneacquaculture.net

read the full article

gallery