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In this performance conceived to celebrate the 700th anniversary of the Poet’s death, the dancers redraw the contours of an inhospitable land, where torments of the damned serve their sentence. The choreographic movements become a mirror of the torment, the bodies are shaped in torsions, syncopations, contractures, insoluble weaves. And yet, as in Dante’s Inferno, there are traces of a decayed humanity, souls that preserve memory of themselves and their past, individualities that emerge like spots of colour in the indistinct magma, out of a desire to tell the outside observer about their lives before death.
Some of them cross the stage still wearing their worn-out earthly clothes, remnants of a nobility that is no longer worth anything, where everyone is equal. Others take shape through the reading of Dante’s verses. Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, Pier Della Vigna in the forest of suicides, Tiresias, Ulysses, Minos… characters that Monica Casadei chooses to investigate the human soul, in a path that from the awareness of sin goes beyond condemnation, towards compassion and acceptance of human nature. There is no lack of moments of sacredness, such as a dance by dervishes in their ample red robes, spinning moved by the wind.
Music contributes to making the journey even more intense: Franz Liszt’s Dante-Symphonie, inspired by the composer’s reading of Dante’s Commedia, and Lacrymosa from Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, meet pages by contemporary composers such as Alfred Schnittke and Krzysztof Penderecki, and the sound atmospheres of Luca Vianini.

Dante Solo Inferno is a constantly evolving journey, part of a wider project of exploration by Monica Casadei of Dante’s Inferno, which has also taken shape in her creations Ombre and Frammenti di Inferno.
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