TACET

This morning, I had a photograph printed: Silvy carrying her daughter, Salomé, on her back along a forest path.

I wanted to give it to her after Tacet tonight.

I find it poetic. Tender.

Until this morning, it existed only as digital data.

I wanted it to have a body.

I like photographs you can hold in your hands.

19:15, Piccolo Teatro.

Silvy told me that my ticket will be waiting for me at the box office.

I entered the theatre and sat in the second row, waiting for Tacet to begin.

I was counting silently to myself. I glanced at my phone. It was exactly 19:30.

The lights went out.

One by one, the performers began to emerge. Neon lights came on behind each of them, like luminous spinal columns.

Then Silvy appeared onstage.

A white circle of light illuminated the centre, and she began to count in Italian.

Uno, due, tre.

The counting went on.
Magnetic. Hypnotic.
Each number a little further from the world, a little deeper inside myself.

I love repetition and counting because I have an obsessive-compulsive tendency to count things in space, everything that enters my field of vision. My OCD dissorder already fed and was satisfied.

When I don’t understand a language, I listen to its sonority rather than its meaning and suddenly, an entirely new world opens up.

English translations appeared above the stage, but I didn’t look at them. I already knew the numbers. I was completely absorbed by their sonority in Italian, and especially by the way Silvy pronounced them. Especially when she reached:

dodici, tredici, quattordici.

The sonority of dici at the end of those numbers moved something in me for which I have no name.

There is something magnetic about Silvy’s presence on stage. While she counts, minute after minute, she holds your attention. You don’t wander elsewhere. You don’t drift away. You are simply there.

The power of now.

The power of simplicity.

From the very beginning, Silvy had drawn me into the present. I felt as I do during my daily practice of Transcendental Meditation: completely here, attentive to the moment, without needing anything else.

When the counting ended, another dynamic began to unfold.

Tacet is a complex, condensed dramaturgical piece.

As I watched, I found myself marvelling at Silvy’s talent. At the scale it has reached.

First, her visual language: so poetic, so entirely her own. Especially the night drawings. I love them. They were, in fact, where our friendship began.

Then Tacet. She performs inside the work while directing it. She is both the body and the eye that watches the body.

Meanwhile, in parallel, back at home, another performance is taking place. Silvy is packing up five years of her life, preparing to leave the apartment she has lived in.

No crew. No technicians. No props, No prompter. Just her two hands, her two feet. The entire production of a life, carried out by one woman and her two hands, her two feet, and the work of moving a life from one place to another.

Watching her onstage, knowing what she carried offstage, gave me a much bigger picture of her talent and strength.

Silvy is like silk, clouds and a river.

I love her because she is real, in whatever form existence chooses to take through her.

Through her work, through her motherhood, through the way she inhabit the domestic landscape of everyday life, through a single second, five minutes, a week, a year, or a millennium. I need her and her art in my life.

At one point, the dancer playing John Cage fell to the floor, dead. It moved me deeply. Because, for me, John Cage can never die.

The piece continued to unfold, and then came the passage about silence and John Cage. This was the part that fascinated me most, because I have been investigating the same question for a long time.

What is silence?

I have been thinking about it particularly through what I might call the Cagean third ear. Cage reminds us that absolute silence does not exist. But dramaturg Jacopo Giacomoni asks: what if John Cage had really made an effort to hear silence?

I am currently reading a book Oliver Frljić recently sent me, Speaking and Language by Paul Goodman. I keep returning to a question that feels increasingly urgent:

Does silence destroy noise, or does noise destroy silence?

Then Pauline Oliveros appeared in the text, too. Her book Deep Listening sits beside my bed like a Bible.

Everything I heard in Tacet felt intimately familiar, and deeply important to me and to the questions I am exploring in my own work.

I love going to the theatre, to an exhibition, or simply anywhere that might leave something in me and change me. Something that exceeds reality. Something that warms me, caresses me, or lifts my spirit. That is what happened to me at Tacet.

Silvy and her team – Jacopo, the dramaturg of Tacet; Gaia Ginevra Giorgi; Dylan Guzowski; Elena Rivoltini; Matteo Zoppi – made something real that exceeded reality.

Each brought a particular talent, contributed to lifting my spirit. I carry a gratitude. We humans, among other things, are here to exchange experiences, to alter each other’s inner temperature.

And then came the end.

Silvy was sitting on the floor, inside a circle, writing down the numbers as she counted down the time remaining until the end.

Then she counted down the very last moment, tre, due, uno, and it really was the end.

The lights went out.

The audience was hesitant, unsure whether the ending was really the end. I think someone from the technical team was the first to break the ice with a round of applause, and then a river of applause began to flow, as it usually does in the theatre.

Afterwards, I went out into the foyer and wrote Silvy a letter on the back of a photograph which I had printed at the print shop this morning. I put it in an envelope and made my way to the backstage entrance – piccolo entrance of Piccolo Teatro.

I had prepared three little pots of orange flowers for Silvy, Elena and Gaia. I knew they would give me something, and I wanted to be ready to give something back to them, too.

There is a myth in India that when someone gives you flowers, they are giving you their heart. So I wanted to offer them a little piece of mine, just as they had offered each of us in the audience a piece of their hearts and their time.

One minute, which, in reality, had become seventy minutes.

I hadn’t brought flowers for the male members of the team, even though they, too, had given their hearts and their time onstage. But I don’t know them personally, whereas I know Silvy, Elena and Gaia. And somehow, I feel more naturally inclined towards women. I respect men, of course, but giving flowers to men – giving them my heart, in a way, still feels somewhat unnatural to me. I am more cautious there.

At the entrance, I immediately ran into Silvy. She was talking to a tall girl by backstage entrance of Piccolo Teatro.

We embraced warmly, even though we had hugged just a few hours earlier at home. We are living together in her apartment throughout October while I am doing my residency at Viafarini.

Then I was introduced to the tall girl who had been talking to Silvy.

The first thought that crossed my mind was: Life is short, but this girl is not.

It turned out that they were sisters. I asked whether they were biological sisters, born to the same mother and father. They said yes.

I would never have guessed. Silvy and her sister, whose name I have already forgotten, seem to belong to two completely different galaxies, light-years apart.

Then I gave Silvy the letter and her little pot of orange flowers. Slowly, everyone began to come out, and I gave Gaia her matching pot, too.

Silvy eventually gathered all three pots and took them backstage to keep them somewhere safe.

By then, everyone was hungry, so we sat down at a nearby prostiuccceria in porta Garibaldi.

They ordered white wine and an enormous sharing platter.

I ordered John Cage water – ambient temperature.

As we waited for the food and drinks, they started singing and preparing songs for the karaoke in Via Sarpi, where they were planning to go the following evening after their final show.

Then the food arrived: a huge platter of prosciutto and other things. The waiter, who was kind and attentive, assured us that the food on the board was still warm and suggested we eat right away, before it got cold. Although there was nothing particularly warm about the platter. Cold prosciutto straight from the fridge.

And then the conversation loosened around the table. We talked, jumped from one subject to another, wandered from thought to thought. I enjoyed listening to them speak Italian, even though I couldn’t understand a word. Once again, I found myself focusing on the sonority of the language.

After all the conversations and conclusions, one thing we all agreed on was that it was time to pay the bill. Numbers again. Counting again. Uno, due, tre, but with more zeros this time.

I wanted to pay for my John Cage water, but Silvy wouldn’t let me. I was her guest.

Afterwards, we all said goodbye outside the prostiuccceria. I was already sleepy. My bedtime is between 10 and 11 pm. I thought Silvy and I would ride home together on our green horses, the Lime bikes.

But Silvy said: No, no, I’m not going home yet.

So I told her: Okay, I’ll give you permission until 1 am. to make it home.

Silvy said: All right, I’ll be home on time, (Mama).

We laughed.

Then I got on my green horse and rode home. On my way, I came across a few pairs of bare legs. Two girls taking pictures of each other and posing in the BAM park. While they were taking pictures of each other, I photographed them too, from a distance and then I counted: uno, due, tre, quattro. Four legs on the way home. So I count the legs in front of me, just to satisfy my OCD counting ritual before bedtime.

Then I arrived home and fell asleep.

I am certain Silvy kept her word and made it home on time.

And even if she didn’t, I slept peacefully, knowing she was in good company.