“Her life could be depicted by two perpendicular axes, on the horizontal one everything that happened to her, she saw, she heard at every moment, on the vertical one only a few images, sinking into the night.” (A. Ernaux, The Years)

Someone has written that there is an unbridgeable distance between what once happened and the way it appears to us now, cloaked in a strange unreality. The choreography of The Years is built to attempt to mend this rip: the incandescent story of an individual – Marta Ciappina, a unique performer in terms of artistic itinerary and technical peculiarities on the Italian dance scene – invites the spectators to play with their own memory. Marta’s body and the eyes of those watching her embark on a journey that shuttles between the present – the moment of the performance, an unrepeatable romantic encounter – and everyone’s past, in a web of comings and goings that blurs stories, songs and memories. The shadow of a novel stretches slowly over stage and audience: the invitation is to write it together, a hundred-handed work that exhorts us to cross the ruins looking upwards.
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