Shows /

Vocià

Collettivo Glitch
2025

In the contemporary narrative context, marked by an overabundance of information, Vocià aims to be a call back to oral storytelling: a performance that shifts each time, a “measured” space where the variations of imagination produce ever-changing versions of stories ready to carve out a place within the circuits of collective memory. This gives rise to an exploration of the body and movement through the multidisciplinary language of contemporary dance and circus, as an allegory of a folkloric-identity moment, yet open to new visions—much in the same way that tradition continuously reinvents itself.

The project’s theme is the popular oral narrative tradition of Maremma and Amiata, expressed through anecdotes, legends, and tales of fear that once filled the imaginations of the peasant world during nightly vigils. Here, the supernatural takes on various forms: from the serpent blending into the dragon, to the white animal often seen at crossroads, to the howls of the werewolf (often heard, rarely seen). More insidious were encounters with witches, which could turn into deadly adventures.

At other times, the stories tell only of voices in the dark: sounds of galloping hooves that never reveal themselves, phantom processions echoing the more majestic wild hunts of Northern Europe.

The substantial difference from the present lies in the role of fear as a co-adjutor—in calling it by name, in giving it a physical place of appearance, what emerges is the portrait of a socially accepted otherness, unsettling yet a guarantor of order.

The project develops from personal experiences and research within the ethnographic collection of the Archive of Popular Traditions of Maremma, a reservoir of voices of men and women whose memory lives on in recorded stories, also used here on stage. People from other eras, different from us yet so similar in destiny—because in the end, only what is entrusted to memory will remain, in whatever form we choose to give it.