Franco-Malagasy dancer and choreographer Soa Ratsifandrihana develops a practice aimed at reconnecting the children of the diaspora with their places of origin, exploring how roots can be reinvented through the body and gesture. Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna – meaning “comparison”, “transmission” and “rivalry” in Malagasy – evokes a 19th-century tradition that anticipated today’s dance battles, while reactivating a gestural language rooted in a memory that predates colonisation.
On stage, four bodies – three dancers and one multi-instrumentalist – emerge from silence and open themselves to the possibility of language: they challenge one another, choose one another, and attempt to shed the layers of violence that inhabit them. The second chapter of a diptych initiated with the documentary Rouge Cratère, the performance continues a dialogue with the past and with a cultural heritage spanning Madagascar, Haiti, Martinique and Guadeloupe. What emerges is a plural narrative, where the fragmentation of diasporic experience is set against a desire for reappropriation and transmission.

17, 19 July h. 16 pm
Teatro alle Tese, Arsenale