A journey by foot crossing Northern Italy, Austria, the Czeck Republic and finally Poland to talk about memory and to raise awareness of historical memory, trying to make sense between the past, present and future: this is a trip made of genuine vital human contacts, walking through the stages of the deportation trip stopping to meet young people.
With this trip we try to take back the meaning of “Men’s stolen Time” in other words we follow a journey in which we cherish to “be slow” as a fundamental value; enabling us to learn to take enough time to care about ourselves and the others; proceeding together step after step.
We believe by walking slowly on the tip of our feet to reach the places of inhumanity, with patience we can find the knowledge, strength and respect necessary to understand them as well and learn to become a bit wiser.
What is today the memory and is the purpose of remembering the Shoa, the extermination of the Jewish people, perpetrated over Europe by the III Reich?
In a recent speech our professor Alberto Cavaglion warns us from being trapped in some kind of excessive celebration which he names “memoriosity”. A set of ritual and limited members, subject to trivialization and leading to anesthesia by excess of communication.
Everybody agrees upon the need to talk about memory and especially to MAKE MEMORY, but methods and approaches must be the tool and not the aim. Remembering for one or two days a year may even trigger aversive reactions, and leaves on the surface a short-lived memory that neither generate confrontation, nor leads to reflection and will not help to build an ethical and deep relationship between people.
For these reasons, as theatre artists, we believe it is essential to recover a relation between past, present and future; here is where our journey instance arises: a march that wants to be a lay pilgrimage where the physical and spiritual dimensions merge; a march made of road and fatigue and at the same time of concrete human and vital relationship with the surrounding environment. Following the stages of deportation , stopping, meeting the young, means recovering a history that belongs to us and that we can not afford to sterilize.
An idea that attempts to restore meaning to “the Time of mankind” through a path where the slowness becomes the fundamental value: only slowly we can take time to care of ourselves and of others; proceeding step by step, we can aggregate and build an itinerant community that shares and participates; it is only slowly, on tiptoes, that we believe we must reach the dehumanization places, because it takes strength, respect and humbleness to face and share them; only through patience we can gain a new force able to create knowledge…
Our idea starts from the theatre and through this journey wants to return to it; we believe that for his nature and origin, theatre can contribute to restore a memory and to reconstitute a community, and we are convinced that along this way, the theatre can play an important role of defense from dissent and fight for approval.
