“… a total work of art that you can not escape …”
Von Helmut Jasny. Westfalische Nachrichten, Germany

“The show is a shock. Look for it at all costs! …”
Thomas Hann. DANSER Canal historique, France

“… a dancing masterpiece…”
Rodolfo di Gianmarco. La Repubblica, Italy

“A fascinating interplay of space, time and movement.”
Kerstin Hergt. Hannoversche Allgemeine, Germany

“… one hour of exceptional dance theatre between video art and electronic avant-garde.”
Giulia Sanzone. Che teatro fa, Italy

“… It is impossible not to be overwhelmed by In Girum Imus Nocte’s infectious patrol”
Attilio Scarpellini. Doppiozero, Italy

“…a wonderful choreographic machine…”
Giuseppe Distefano. Il sole 24 ore, Italy

A rugged black and white, and a hypnotic music make up the environment in which the micro stories of this peripatetic night show are linked together, a mixture between cinema, dance and theatre. The cold light of a video projector articulates the spaces, times and geometry, and the black costumes turn the characters translucent, projecting them into a timeless past inhabited by a dispersed humanity that moves on, struggling, with a brusque, emotional, disorganized gestuality, beyond exhaustion, slowly falling into a trance. The pulsing rithm of the music and movement carries one, little by little, to a dimension that is hypnotic, and an empathy that is close to being physical with the fatigue of the interpreters. ”In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni” (“We go around at night burnt up by fire”), enigmatic latin palindrome with uncertain origin, which was already chosen as title by Guy Debord for his famous movie in 1978, it therefore goes beyond its possible interpretation as a metaphor of living endlessly consumed in desires, to become a cathartic experience of its comical and grotesque exhaustion.

Presentation by ANDREA PORCHEDDU

Artists are miles ahead: they explore unknown areas that we – critics or, at least, those of us who think they are critics – try to structure, codify and urbanize.
Occasionally, then, some creations shed light on what we are, or what we will be, in advance. They give meaning to the tiring work of writing our own biographies: they tell us what we are going to experience. And then, we understand more. It happened to me with In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (We go around at night consumed by fire): the performance by Roberto Castello and his most refined group ALDES perfectly shows reality in Italy and beyond. We are worn out, tired, exhausted, and lost. Sad and disheartened, but nevertheless we are no quitters or losers.
That handful of heroes that are repeatedly advancing, and yet staying put, is the perfect incarnation of a widespread state of being. The mysterious Latin palindrome, which makes up the title of the performance, is the hint to a fresco worthy of Bosch or Bruegel, which immerses us into a pure contemporary medieval age: they are the “tribes” dear to the philosopher Michel Maffessoli when, in L’istante eterno (The eternal instant), he evokes the return of tragedy in the postmodern age. The tragedy by ALDES is not a violent one: on the contrary, it is acquired, introjected, co-experienced by a tired humanity, which continues to march relentlessly on the spot, while struggling and fighting in a race without any finish line. They are tormented souls, they are exhausted pilgrims, they are – with sudden pain – today’s migrants.
The dancers have bodies, faces, hands which tell stories: they walk, tormented by an obsessive loop of electronic music, in an alternating sequence of light and dark marked by a diaphanous Beckettian voice which pushes everything to absurdity. It is the human condition that Mr Castello is talking about. The choreographer does not condemn; on the contrary, with the most human empathy, he evokes moments of contact and, perhaps, tenderness, and overall scenes, where wandering seems to lead to peace. But there is no way to escape from the closed box, which is a black and white world marked by fragments projected like rain or scratches, oblique, claustrophobic cuts of light, details as suffocating as the general vision. In the race between the last, even those who save themselves are lost.