Foreign Voices

Show on the theme of emigration and coexistence between different cultures

Characteristically Silence Teatro, this performance which is one part of an opus with travel and the many ways of being travellers as it theme – both in life and on the stage – interacts with and measures itself against open spaces.

Just like back in the XIX century, when many European peoples sought fortune in America, today there is still a multitude of persons forced to leave the lands where they were born and grew up. Millions of identical and different stories: men, women and children rejected from their lands because of intolerance or poverty; by political, racial, religious oppression or by wars, always the order of the day.

People who leave everything to find themselves cast up in places reminding of Ellis Island, described by Georges Perec as ”the place where there is no place, the non place, nowhere”.

Places where people find no signs, roots or traces, but rather something we could call reclusion, separation or rift.

Sixteen million emigrants passed through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1914. Today, Boat People continue to row, in the search for ever more improbable havens; the “foreigner” however, wants to find something that belongs to him in a new land, some trace of his history. A collection of customs, gestures, rites to be shared beyond the frontiers. Fragments of memories, words that come back, memories of nursery rhymes, ways eating, dancing, singing; religiously conserved photographs. Sharing these things that have become roots menaced by time and man. Signs of belonging, on which to base one’s own story, on which to forge one’s own identity.

In other words what someone does to be himself, and at the same time to be identical to the next person.

Foreign voices is dedicated to all the stories of wandering and of hope in our third millennium.