Do we truly see when we see? And what do we see when we believe we are seeing?
Is there perhaps an element of faith, of trust, of surrender, when we seek or think we see? Gaze, eye, sight, vision—seeing is not just seeing: every gaze requires a concealment.
On July 25th, with VENI, VIDI, SO_Il Forte Borgo, the performance focuses on the Village: here, the gaze becomes wandering, contact, and minute life. The houses, the passageways, the openings, and the everyday distances become points of observation.
On July 26th, with VENI, VIDI, SO_Il Borgo Forte, the performance focuses on the Fortress: monumental architecture, stratified memory, a machine made of stone and vision. Here, the gaze takes on another vibration: broader, more vertical, perhaps more restless. Perspective expands, the body measures distance, and the music inhabits cavities, surfaces, and echoes. In the Fortress, seeing means confronting that which looms over, protects, separates, and preserves.
There are places where the earth seems to draw closer to the sky.
Hamlets suspended between memory and the wind, stones that guard voices, mountains that are not merely landscape but destiny, wound, protection, and story.
Rochemolles, a marvelous hamlet of Bardonecchia, is one of these places. Overwhelmed and destroyed by an avalanche in 1706, and struck again in 1961, it carries within its history the mark of an ancient fragility and a stubborn capacity for rebirth.
With ESP – Extra Sensory Perception, Cubo Teatro and Benedetta Parisi construct a sensory and interactive experience designed for the Tur d’Amun in Bardonecchia, an archaeological park that holds the remains of the ancient manor castle.
Here, there is no stage to look at: the location itself becomes the stage. The stones, the trajectories, the silences, and the encounters become part of an immersive device where the performance happens, first and foremost, in the mind of the participant.
On one hand, a high-profile orchestra aims to enchant the audience with performances of the most beautiful classical compositions by Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss, and Brahms.
On the other, a gritty showman is searching for his stage to express his talent. A stroke of fate brings the two together. What follows is a tug-of-war fought with music and baton strikes—an exhilarating musical duel featuring surprising and unexpected pop infusions.
There are concerts that begin when the music starts.
And others that seem to arrive from a more ambiguous place: from a dream already in progress, from a mental chamber, from an image that we no longer know whether it belongs to cinema, to memory, or to a gentle nightmare.
Some instruments safeguard a collective memory. The accordion is one of them: the breath of the people, a voice of the streets and celebrations, the melancholy of the dance, travel, and nostalgia.
But in the hands of Richard Galliano, this instrument ceases to belong to a single landscape and becomes the world: it traverses jazz, dialogues with Bach, brushes against tango, reinvents French tradition, and opens itself to the vertigo of improvisation.
Some eras never stop seducing us.
Not because they were perfect, but because they knew how to transform life into vision, desire into art, and the night into a promise. The Belle Époque is one of these: a feverish, glittering, and restless time, in which painting, music, invention, and dreams seemed to mingle within the very same breath.
La Nuit Fantastique invites us to cross that threshold.
Not as distant spectators, but as guests of a Parisian café in the early twentieth century, immersed in a world where anything can happen: the appearance of brilliant artists and inventors, the dizzying allure of immortal music, the glow of an image coming to life, and the increasingly blurred line between reality and imagination.
