FURIOSO is a study of fragility as a condition of the contemporary world: a physical act that becomes a poetic gesture, a leap into the void in which the community sees itself reflected. It is a run-up before the launch, a liberating explosion, a form of collective survival.

The performer’s body — broken, evanescent, epiphanic — is placed at the centre of the work: a body exposed to the gaze, changing within its very presence, carrying all of its contradictions. Like Ariosto’s poem, this body too is polyphonic, crossed by divergent forces, overlapping identities, and desires that generate fractures and new possibilities.

Balletto Civile approaches Orlando Furioso as a living organism, a poem without a single protagonist, in which the voice passes from one character to another like sap flowing through one immense narrative body. One plot intertwines with another, and what happens never truly belongs to just one person.

Why speak today of a chivalric poem? Why return to Ariosto in a world that seems to be moving in a completely different direction from that of knights and paladins? Because beneath the armour there are no heroes, only shattered human beings.

FURIOSO is not a catalogue of heroic feats: it is a map of human disorientation. A book about escapes, pursuits, illusions, salvific and devastating loves, identities that shift with every encounter. It is the poem of discontinuity, deviation, error, of a desire that always exceeds reality.

In a present in which we are constantly searching for a centre that keeps slipping away, Ariosto speaks to us with astonishing clarity: we are fragmented creatures, crossed by passions we do not know how to order. That is why the poem is still necessary: because its chaos is our chaos. Madness as a contemporary key.

In FURIOSO, madness is not loss: it is revelation. It is the moment in which forms begin to waver and the world can be seen from another angle.

National premiere.

Credits
Concept, direction and choreography: Michela Lucenti | Dramaturgy: Emanuela Serra, Maurizio Camilli | Performed by: Balletto Civile | Assistant choreographer: Alessandro Pallecchi | Dramaturg: Attilio Caffarena | Assistant director: Francesco Gabrielli | Sound dramaturgy: Daniele Boccardi | Costumes: Giulia Spattini | Lighting: Lorenzo Diofili | Organisation: Ambra Chiarello | Production: Balletto Civile | With the support of: MAB – Maison des Artistes de Bard and MiC – Ministero della Cultura.

Balletto Civile is characterized by its search for a "total" scenic language by privileging the interaction between theater, dance and original live singing. The company has received several awards for its work including the ANCT Prize, Premio Internazionale Roma Danza, Premio Hystrio Corpo a Corpo, Premio Danza&Danza and Premio Rete Critica.