Choreography
Caterina Sagna
With
Alessandro Bernardeschi, Clelia Moretti, Caterina Sagna
Music
Chemical Brothers, D. Reinhardt, Massive Attack, Moby, D. Ross, Tindersticks
Costumes
Tobia Ercolino
Light design
Nuccio Marino
Photo
Maarten Vanden Abeele

Production
Associazione Compagnia Caterina Sagna / Kunstencentrum Vooruit (Gent)





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The Lady gets tired easily, suffers from headaches and is always very busy.
The Lady has a great fear of being ridiculous, gets bored very often,suffers from depression.
The Lady regularly resorts to sanitary and beauty cares and keeps herself up to date with the cultural news; she is always adequate.
The Lady’s teeth have no cavities.
The Lady travels often.
The Lady believes kids to be too intrusive and cannot stand cats.
The Lady owns some stock, but she does not remember which ones and gets nervous reading the daily news.
The Lady has moving and licentious memories.
The Lady does not cook but knows how to create highly refined menus, she cannot play golf but goes to the club every week-end, she does not read books but knows all the authors and titles in the best-seller’s list.
The Lady is always a little cold and in order to get warmer she drinks, she adores wine.
The Lady never finds what she is looking for.
The Lady has much imagination and great taste.
The Lady is ready for anything.

Caterina Sagna



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Complimentary flowers for the Lady
Roberto Fratini Serafide,
May 2000


Tu vis? ou vois-je ici l'ombre d'une princesse?
Mallarmé, Hérodiade

E per me stessa nessuna! Nessuna!
Per me, io sono colei che mi si crede.
Pirandello, Così è (se vi pare)


Clumsily trinitarian in the almost nursing obedience of her two servants who literally "prepare" her, organic figures in her existence as well as she is organic to their "resistance" (any high school memory of Genet must be, therefore, immediately repressed), the Lady lets herself be written with capital L, because she does not own a name at all; like God, she finds it altogether hard to determine herself; and unlike God, she does not stand on ceremony. For this reason maybe the contracted measure of a dance performance does not exhaust her, because she is totally partial, fanciful, unfulfilled. What happens on stage does non illustrate the type of woman rolling in money, or a snobbish caricature: as far as she appears bathed in drawing-room languors and in high fashion totems, the Lady is not less absolute, or less desperate than Herodiades, Melisande or the Dame of Shalott, all of them "comparative" ladies, too. Nor is she less hopelessly inconsistent. She also embodies, with fastidious inadequacy, a certain female, lanky longing to be what she is not, if only she could be something.

She does it by resorting to the easy implements of that upper middle class described in scandal magazines , in order to emphasize that the longing, not its object, is what really counts. Too weak, and too little heroic to pretend to be some kind of novelty, whether saint or charmer or victim, she does not find any advantage in appearing anything other than something already seen: to be recognized more than to recognize herself.

Thus, being the opaque part of that whole which is a woman, she exists thanks to a few particles of that whole which is high society: vermouth glasses, pills, dresses, ballroom tunes and unforgiving dance music: sanctified things, celebrated by fancy, in which, without ever confessing, the Lady receives Holy Communion. A game is what reproduces the intrigue of life in the absence of any instrumentality, and of any gravity: the shadow, Laban might say, of the effort which is existence. In order to be free from a pragmatic aim, the game must ascribe itself, officially, a conventional one: game time, score, conquest. The game played by the Lady has the same prerogatives, and equally tends to infinity: the metamorphoses, the pick-me-ups, the "hops" reach their goal as points in a score, within the limits assigned to by the one hour length of the play; but the frenzy to score as much as possible adds them together in a sort of parataxis, a speech with no hierarchies, "inconsequential" in the noblest sense of the word.

The climax scene, the keystone, is falsely pursued, and in fact is postponed to a somewhere else that does not let itself be caught by the tail. As if, after devoting herself to enrich some chimerical collection of attitudes and symptoms, the Lady could exhibit nothing but its "sample-cards", since even she could be listed as a catalogue of anatomical parts, coordinated but never "orderly".

She might be seen, during the bows, showing a sort of embarrassment for that game which might have continued, but which, even by dilating itself to the limits of physical strength, could never approach life, or a "thesis" on life, with a better approximation than that of the asymptotes of a parabolic curve to the vertical and horizontal axes in a Cartesian quadrant.

The Lady has no content, and, in spite of all the tricks to look like one, she is not yet a form. Rather, she is the temporary content, doomed to extinction, the mold of the form that is to come and that others will recognize, except filling her up with further contents: the cloth wraps her up modeling her like an inert matter around its matrix, and only then, having found a place in a palimpsest, it shall be called a dress. And only then, by being everything other than naked, the Lady reveals herself (in the most religious sense of the expression: to draw a readable veil on the incommunicable. But if even the latest dogma of so much avant-garde, the one which equals nudity to truth, has lost its bite, we will still confide on the compass of the great twilights: "I shall recognize you from your mask".

(Translation by Mariella Lo Sardo Towner)

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