What language will you speak?
The language I will speak will definitely have a lower tone because it will have been stifled by wearing a mask for months. I am obviously speaking in metaphorical terms, but I think that the comparison with early-teenage boys’ voice breaking and decreasing its pitch is particularly well suited. That change in voice register marks the passage from childhood to adulthood. In more subtle terms, it should mark the passage from a state of innocence to maturity. And I hope that’ll be the case for me.
The Covid-19 pandemic has been the first planetary ‘performative’ experience in the history of humanity. Unlike the thousands of wars that have marked history (including the two so-called ‘world’ wars of the 20th century, which in fact excluded quite a few countries), the pandemic has ‘embraced’ the whole planet Earth, changing everybody’s condition from a ‘before’ to an ‘after’. It will leave a sign on each of us. Language is the final expression of our inner self, therefore for many of us (and I hope to be among them) it will inevitably be a more mature language, enriched by those words that have become part of our current lexicon, no matter how we will have intimately dealt with the experience.
Those who will emerge from Covid-19 unscathed will be changed people; said that, I don’t agree with the sappy notion that we will all be better people. Some will, some won’t. It will depend on whether we have been considering this crisis from a purely materialistic point of view, only worrying about the effects without investigating the causes, which will lead us to become more and more materialistic, selfish, detached from others and from the world; or we have somehow tried to change or improve something inside and outside ourselves. In other words, whether we have passively endured it (waiting for the much-coveted cure) or we have positively reacted to it, each in our field of expertise. These two human trends will drift more and more apart and will speak more and more different and unintelligible languages.
Throughout these months I haven’t searched for a new language so much as for a new way of thinking. Immediately after the first closure of the theatres, being unable to continue with my programme of productions, I cleared my mind to make room for new ideas for dance, fuelling them with inspirations from figurative art. I in fact went to see the big Raffaello exhibition (which also closed the following day) and I let beauty fill my eyes and slowly percolate to my heart and brain, which perform at their best when they work together. During the first lockdown I conceived the shows I produced in the summer: Duets and Solos and Le Creature di Prometeo / Le Creature di Capucci (Prometheus’s creatures / Capucci’s creatures), already introducing a new language.
Throughout this new lockdown, after feeding on exhibitions and (when they were closed too) on the permanent exhibitions that are the works of art housed in Roman churches, I will continue conceiving new ideas for dance. My language will be made of facts rather than words, it will be the final action of a new way of thinking.
Not surprisingly, my thinking and my speaking are at the service of art, a universal language, and in particular of dance, which is considered the oldest form of human language. Although I’ve never been very talkative (preferring to remain silent, ready to intervene in times of need), I will keep speaking because words are necessary to carry out the final action, a means to produce my shows. But my spoken language will be different too, studded with even longer silences than usual, silences born of long conversations with myself during the long periods of confinement. And those silences, I think, will broaden my language, if it’s true, as Mozart said, that “the music is not in the notes, but in the silence between”.
