The abyss

Davide Enia

I saw the first landing in Lampedusa with my father. A lot of people landed on the pier, mostly boys and girls. I was speechless. It was history that had happened to us. The history that is studied in books and that fills films and documentaries.
I spent a lot of time on the island trying to establish a dialogue with the direct witnesses: the fishermen and the coastguard, the residents and the doctors, the volunteers and the divers. Compared to the material I had previously studied, there was a clear difference in what I found in person: during our meetings, people spoke in dialect. Feelings and fears, hopes and traumas were named according to the language of the cradle, using its sounds and symbols. I was also able to understand the silences between the syllables, the sudden emptiness that shattered the sentence and reduced the meaning to an unspeakable extremity. It was in this absence of words that I grew up. In the south, the look and the gesture are narrative, and in Sicily, "'a megghiu parola è chìdda ca 'un si dice'", the best word is the one that is not pronounced.

In The abyss, the languages of theatre (gesture, song, cunto) are used to tackle the mosaic of this present time.
What is happening in Lampedusa is not only a meeting point between different geographies and cultures. It is really a bridge between different historical periods, the world as we have known it until today and what it could be tomorrow. Everything is already changing. And it has been changing for more than a quarter of a century.
Davide Enia

Director's notes
How to tell the present in a moment of crisis. This question is fraught with pitfalls. Above all, there is the constant risk of spectacularising the tragedy. The work is therefore directed towards the search for a continuous dryness in which words, gestures, notes, rhythms, cunto must be essential, indispensable, necessary for the construction of the internal movement. This has determined the performative character of the work on stage, in which one reprojects oneself in the exact emotional state that generated everything, immersing oneself in that exact state of feeling, in a loop that repeats itself replica after replica, in a continuous return that has no other outcome than being relived, word after word, gesture after gesture, sound after sound, trauma after trauma, cunto after cunto.

Running time: 75 minutes