Choreography and direction: Salvatore Romania, Laura Odierna 

Music: Salvatore Amore | Performer: Salvatore Romania | Musicians: Salvo Amore (guitars), Carlo Cattano (sax and flutes), Giovanni Arena (double bass)

“In this Ka_Be, a parenthesis of relative peace, we have learnt that our personality is fragile, it is much more in danger than our life… We have seen our women and children leave for nowhere; made slaves we have marched a hundred times back and forth to mute toil, extinguished in their souls before anonymous death… Their souls are dead and the music pushes them on, like the wind on dry leaves. There is no longer a will: every pulse becomes a step, a reflex contraction of exhausted muscles…a dance of dull men…” 

Primo Levi 

The Nazi concentration camps were the cruellest and most ferocious manifestation of the aversion to diversity and otherness, according to a process of depersonalisation and standardisation that is still applied today in many political and social contexts. Several million Jews met a senseless death, but the victims of the Nazi’s blind fury were also others, often forgotten. Homosexuals, political dissidents, so-called outcasts, Sinti, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the ‘asocial’: disabled, mentally ill, lesbians. The numbers are impressive, but behind the numbers there are people, stories, faces, individualities that represent society in its most complete manifestation. The world is still full of lagers that contain and torture: making a list would be impartial and insufficient, but it is enough to remember the detention camps in Libya for sub-Saharan migrants and others, the concentration camps for homosexuals in Chechnya, the cages for children on the border between Mexico and the USA, the “re-education” camps for the Uighurs in China, the refugee camps in the occupied lands of Palestine and the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar. The will to bring back to memory is indispensable, it must be a “stumbling block” in the consideration of reality, past and present, and in the elaboration of a policy that can guarantee the respect and the protection of otherness and that definitively abandons the idea of an ethical-moral superiority of any kind.

A Megakles Ballet production with the contribution of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and the Assessorato Turismo Sport Spettacolo Regione Sicilia.