un attimo prima

Trilogy of breakings and repairings – part two

By Gabriella Salvaterra

Featuring Gabriella Salvaterra and 12 participants from the training and creation workshop

After working on the evocative power of installation with “dopo”, I continued my research on fractures and repair. Symbolic, material, practical, physical, and emotional fractures mark us with scars—more or less visible—that tell our story. The possible repairs, the impossible ones, the clumsy ones, the ones that “almost see nothing anymore”; and the pieces we still have yet to try to put back together. A MOMENT BEFORE is the creation of a “performance” that I prefer to imagine as an “inhabited format,” in which I have retained elements from my previous installation work, but where I gave greater importance to the presence of multiple inhabitant-actors, creating an experience for a larger group of audience travelers. It is a journey in which each traveler constructs their own story—a space where the memory of the body of those who visit can emerge, where coincidence can become meaningful and create the conditions for an experience to come to life. I do not have a fixed artistic group; each time I work with local people/artists/actors who wish to participate in the project, enriching it with their new and diverse presences, their memories, their improvisations, their personal fractures and repairs. In this way, I also continue my educational project, as the preparation of participants for the performance always allows me to run a workshop introducing the sensory language, which naturally concludes in the performance. Each of us has something to say about fractures; sometimes the words are familiar, sometimes completely new to me. Each time I work with new people, new doors of perception and new perspectives for my research open. When asked what A MOMENT BEFORE is, I reply that I think, and hope, that it is a poetic experience. There are people who say that in life, everything can be fixed.

reviews

And there are absolutely no stereotyped conventions in Un attimo prima (A Moment Before), 50 minutes of a 360-degree synesthetic journey of the body, the mind, the soul, which moves and touches deeply, unsettles and tears, caresses and breaks…

Creating and guaranteeing this multi-sensory experience—which thrives on paradoxes because it is light and profound, delicate and penetrating, joyful and poignant, fragile and strong—is the unique sensibility of Gabriella Salvaterra. For nearly twenty years, she worked with Enrique Vargas’s Teatro de los Sentidos (Theatre of the Senses), where the only rule has always been play.

One leaves educated in the art of listening and with a few fruitful tears on the face.

Michele Sciancalepore | Agorà – Avvenire

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reviews

Un attimo prima (A Moment Before) is a poignant and painful performance that, as Salvaterra herself states, revolves around the concepts of rupture and repair.

Un attimo prima is the instant before the rupture, the moment before everything fell apart; like the plate that the actress, seated at a laid table where she invites us to sit, shows us. The cracks, numerous and branched, start from one point: “Do you see it? Here where everything begins, is when my mother became ill,” she tells us, but in the meantime, we are there stroking those porcelain fractures as if we were caressing our own soul, as if we were feeling the edges of the wounds…

Making the whole experience even more evocative and successful are the costumes and the beautiful set design, where nothing seems left to chance and one breathes the rarefied air of a childhood memory.

Un attimo prima is a difficult performance, as I mentioned at the beginning, which if approached with the right openness and the right courage, can offer enormous emotions. Try it to believe it.

Nike Francesca del Quercio

fermataspettacolo.it | r ead the full article

reviews

In UN ATTIMO PRIMA (A Moment Before), the memory of the hand washing in the dark, offered to each participant by a stranger, remains unsettling—perhaps the same stranger we find ourselves dancing blindfolded with shortly after. Or maybe the same person who cataloged us at the beginning and with whom we exchanged a few words? We don’t know, because these figures are essentially emotional mediums, who gently support small moments of transference—that mental mechanism, we recall, studied in psychology, by which an individual tends to shift patterns of feelings, emotions, and thoughts that occurred in the past onto a person entering into a relationship with us in the present time, in this case, unknown and largely dark and unidentifiable.

Someone who has already seen some of these creations might say: this time I won’t fall for it, it won’t trick me, I know what happens.

And yet… Every time, in some corner of the labyrinth, at some moment, even while resisting, one gets lost; contact with full rationality is lost, and one finds oneself in a no-man’s land, where one is alone—yes, alone to deal with memories of indecipherable contours that resurface, sensations of the immediate moment without the world around, the “real” world, the outside, having to interfere.

Renzo Francabandera

paneacquaculture.net | read the full article

reviews

It reassures you, at a certain point, that the same person begins to lay out a dozen photographs before your eyes. And asks you to choose one. I chose an old Polaroid, with mountains faded pink and a small car from which the slanted face of a woman emerges. It could be my mother. Summer. Meadows. The Sixties. The small holidays of us little Italians. “This is when everything was fine. When everything seemed perfect,” reminds me the voice in front of me. And she takes my hand…

…tells us Gabriella Salvaterra, seated in the center. The host, she too grazes the crack in her own plate. “Some argue that everything has a remedy. I don’t believe that’s entirely true. There are things that are irreparable. Or become irreparable. While there is a time for repair, a right time.” She says this, while each of us tries to ascend our own time and find in memory the moment when that crack also opened for us, never remedied since then, that edge that still cuts. Meanwhile, someone, gently, puts a blindfold over my eyes from behind…

…almost 50 minutes have passed, we all exit together, all twelve of us, from this labyrinth of memories. Many are moved.

Roberto Canziani