year: 2019

by and with Elisa Pol e Valerio Sirna
lights Mattia Bagnoli
sound design Flavio Innocenti e Valerio Sirna
sculpture Mattia Cleri Polidori e Giulia Costanza Lanza
technical collaboration Nikki Rodgerson / Mutoids
supported by Armunia Residenze Artistiche Castiglioncello, Nerval Teatro, Santarcangelo Festival, Atto Due – Laboratorio Nove, Spazio ZUT! Progetto Cura, Florian Espace Progetto OIKOS
thanks to Barbara Bessi
photos DIANE | ilariascarpa | lucatelleschi, Antonio Ficai

progetto finalista premio Scenario 2017

premiere Festival Inequilibrio 2019, Castiglioncello (LI)

For their project I Giardini di Kensington Elisa Pol and Valerio Sirna – both active in various different fields of research in the performing arts – join artistic forces to explore the relationship between script-writing and choreography, investigating the dynamics of cohabitation and proximity within a domestic space. The work is divided into three chapters: The Quarrel, The Refuge and The Move.

«Our goal is now clear: we must show how the house is one of the most powerful cohesive elements for man’s thoughts, memories and dreams.»
G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

A living room. A few basic elements establish the interior. An unidentified object hovers over the room.
Bored, gentle, irritable, elegant, loving yet litigious, close yet distant, thrown together in the intimacy of having nothing to say to one another, two characters navigate the terms of sharing one space.
An unspecified timespan- a day, a year, a life – reveals the tensions in everyday life; the most common gestures of domestic life acquire a strange and unexpected weight.
The room is thus transformed into a series of corners; at times cosy, intimate shelters, or a vast, disorienting desert expanse. An elsewhere emerges out of the perception of their altered space, while the binary and normative social model- to which it once adhered- is destabilised and quietly explodes.

“Like a Hopper painting, with their fragile and stationary gestures Elisa Pol and Valerio Sirna portray the restless tension that underlies the self-contained; in sync between theatre and dance.”
[T.Chimenti, Recensito, July 2, 2018]

“A very well-balanced blend of precision and humour, aesthetic perfection and lightness.”
[P. Verlengia, TeatriOnline, October 3, 2018]