Contemporary theatre show
Co-written and performed with Vittoria Quartararo
Paris, 2025, work in progress
Presented as a work-in-progress perfomance at Goethe Istitute Paris, march 2025
A forest of texts and a single apple hang from the ceiling of the stage. At the center of the front stage stands a hybrid object, where one can play and write: half piano, half school blackboard. Around and between these elements move two characters: one in the role of a language teacher, the other in that of a pianist. Throughout the play, they dig obsessively into the fields of language and music, as well as into the links that bind them: the semantics of falling, of “cadere,” of self-representation, of language and silence, of Wittgensteinian language games.
In this surreal theatrical universe, where everything can collapse at any moment, these two roles embody eternal inner forces: constructive and destructive, absurd and rational, ascending and descending — like the shape of the circumflex accent.
The language lesson is interrupted by many unexpected elements: foreign accents, grammatical mistakes, random musical notes, and the repetitive cadences of a passacaglia. The “teacher’s” goal of classifying reality into chapters is constantly undermined by the “musician’s” desire to disrupt this logical structure through the idea of falling.
Like the literary figure of the oxymoron, a “teacher” of Ukrainian origin teaches the grammatical tenses of the French language. Drawing a parallel between lived life and grammatical rules, she illustrates the pluperfect tense by referring to her life in Ukraine. What happened afterward is linked to the conditional mood and to life’s potential turning points: what would happen if everyone could utopically “speak the same language”? What if we were no longer afraid of the fall of the passacaglia? What if the language lesson never ended? And if the apple finally fell from the string?
