In order to explain “Ma-shalai” is important to consider that this performance is the second phase of a project we have been working at since 2008: ‘L’albero di limoni’(the Lemon tree). This led us to search our deepest roots, as Sicilian people, in order to understand what moves each person, which feelings tend to link and which to separate each other. We discovered that today the gesticulation which follows, animates and strengthens speeches and concepts to explain, is a reminiscence of a wider and even more complex symbolic gesticulation which this population has developed during the centuries. A real gesture code so well defined to make any verbal communication useless, as the Italian folklorist G. Pitrè remarked during his Sicily tour. The study of this gestural expressiveness gave birth to the first performance of “L’albero di limoni” project (“Nei frammenti l’intero”) in coproduction with czd and presented in 2009 within Scenario Pubblico’s programme. “Ma-shalai”, a Sicilian word meaning a moment of deep but short or even ephemeral and sometimes illusory luxury, points out that, despite several contradictions portray, liven up and damage Sicilian people, in the air flutters a sweet and wild poetic passion which is completely stifled by those who, helped by the violence and the complicity of the institutional absence, imposed to this earth an infamous place in history. Far be it from us the idea to file a complaint, we are only trying to give voice to that poetry so that she can overcome the deafness of prejudice.

 

Direction and coreography Salvatore Romania e Laura Odierna

 

Music project Salvatore Romania

 

 

Musical composition Michele Conti

 

Dancers Claudia Bertuccelli, Valeria Ferrante, Laura Odierna, Salvatore Romania

 

 

Musicians Michele Conti, Hilmar Pintaldi Funes