Instabili Vaganti theatre company returns to Asia carrying five different shows on tour, with performances and laboratory activities in eight cities in India, Indonesia, and Nepal.
In New Delhi, the company stages Dante Beyond Borders, Italian-Indian co-production between Instabili Vaganti, the Italian Cultural Institutes in Mumbai and New Delhi, and Ahum Trust, inspired by Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and created on the occasion of the celebrations for the 700th anniversary of the death of the ‘Sommo Poeta’.

The show directed by Anna Dora Dorno explores different languages ranging from traditional Indian dance to physical and experimental theatre, from video art to electronic music, to ferry the audience into the otherworldly journey undertaken by Dante.
The result of a long process of work started during the first lockdown, in which the company worked remotely, on video, with classical dancer Anuradha Venkataraman, Dante Beyond Borders stages “the Absence”. The evocative physical actions take place in an essential setting, characterized by few scenic objects that are also natural and material elements: sand, coal, a burnt log. The lights and video projections evoke dreamlike contexts and imaginary naturalistic scenarios that become scenographic backdrops or elements of separation to be crossed to enter otherworldly contexts.
In these dreamlike spaces, the physical actions by performer Nicola Pianzola meet the mudras and gestures of the Bharatanatyam dance, choreographed by Anuradha Venkataraman, while the electronic music by composer Riccardo Nanni interacts with the Indian classical sounds and the vocal experiments by the performers on Dante’s text and on poetic fragments from the Mahābhārata, creating evocative soundscapes.
The performance becomes a concrete tool for exploring the numerous connections between Dante's work and the Indian culture, both from the iconographic and the philosophical and theological point of view. It is also and above all a means of connection between two secular cultural traditions such as the Italian and Indian one. In fact, Dante repeatedly mentions India and the river Ganges in his poem, and as per the tradition of the time, places the earthly Paradise in the Indian territory. India and its wonders, therefore, struck the mind of a poet who, imagining the East, saw the sun rise from the river sacred to the Hindus.
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