A wardrobe mirror in the centre of the stage is the element around which the performance develops: “As a Child Abandoned in the Wardrobe Mirror” is a dancetheatre work created by Patrizia Cavola and Ivan Truol, loosely based on Daniel Pennac’s novel “Diary of a Body”. One by one, the seven performers burst into the stage, each with their peculiar gestures and way to reflect both their physical appearance and especially the image of themselves.
In front of the mirror (sort of self-consciousness) they wink at their imperfections, touch and distort them, emphasise and study them to exorcise them. Each body has characteristics that make it special, but at the same time our bodies can all belong to that ironic list of parts as places and motors for sensations and emotional states, in a precise mechanism where personal and universal experience alternate, represented through the continual succession of solos and synchronized collective pieces. The words uttered by the performers or the voice-over are an interior dialogue that makes the evolution of gestures and scenes explicit. Unbalancing, falling, shivering and tickling are physical and emotional exercises through which the performers regain their bodies and, once the costumes are taken off, they can finally look at each other and simply interact by instinct. Atacama’s investigation is developed through opposites: the chain of trifles, fears and phobias is counterbalanced by a circus of playful shows and acts of bravery of the body that becomes a proper body-theatre, a box from which infinite marvels can come out. The wardrobe mirror is the threshold to cross in order to reach this awareness, preferably in solitude, when the only one looking at us is the child that we abandoned inside.
Ludovica Marinucci
Nucleo Art-Zine
