La Cosa

• Duration: 55 min
• Belgium - Italy
• For all
• 1063 vues

Claudio Stellato

Four men in suits, dressed up to the nines, four blocks of wood and a strange arch made of logs. Armed with axes, the actors lay into the blocks of wood and send chips flying in all directions. They grab hold of the logs, throwing and juggling them to make and break new forms, moving the pile of wood from one end of the stage to the other…
La Cosa is an iconoclastic performance combining dance, visual theatre and rippling muscles! Claudio Stellato pushes the boundaries of theatrical genres, playing with ideas of appearance and disappearance, blurring the distinction between the human body and natural materials, employing a choreography full of contortions informed by circus traditions. Finding inspiration in banal, every-day rituals, he pushes repetition to the point of absurdity. Not without a certain dose of humour, this constant construction and deconstruction creates a precarious sense of equilibrium, a dynamic of perpetual mutation. Like a metaphor for life, success and failure are never far apart, risk goes hand-in-hand with accident, poetry and sensuality spring from the most unlikely situations. Pushing their bodies to the limits of their physical capacities, the performers evoke a succession of contrasting emotions, charming the audience into a sense of child-like wonder. Somewhere between an elaborate game and a ceremony, at its heart La Cosa is about the relationship between man and nature.