Dancing in a music box

There a place where time thins out between the notes of well-known tunes, where love dances across generations and makes one of past, present, and future in endless embrace. Here, on the enchanting stage of Il tango delle capinere, echoes a beautiful melody that touches the human spirit. The theatre piece by Emma Dante follows her Trilogia degli Occhiali (lit. ‘The Spectacle Trilogy’) ten years later, casting the same actors as the two lovers in her performative study Ballarini, though while in Ballarini, the couple disappeared and reappeared in bursts, here – says Dante – they stay on stage as we follow them into their house, we see them fight and make love, present as they are in linear fashion. The two lovers remain nameless. When you live with someone long enough, their name doesn’t matter anymore. They are part of you. Him and her — that’s us, that’s all of us.
Husband-and-wife actor couple Sabino Civilleri and Manuela Lo Sicco take the audience in a journey of emotion, murmur, gestures. A kaleidoscope of memories. The play begins with an elderly lady crouching down in front of a trunk. From there, she takes out item after item, each recalling an intense moment of her existence. Accompanying her is the spirit of her late husband, dancing with her.

Music is the driving force of the epos, a marathon of Italian pop taking us back in time as the two protagonists free themselves from the masks of old age, take off their clothes, and grow younger and younger. Each passage is a fragment of shared history and symbols as the story guides us to the moment they first met, the moment two souls choose a kind of love that can be best described, again in Dante’s words, as a blank page.
Running backwards, the play combines snapshots of a full, joyful, painful life: a choreography of memories, a nostalgic, melancholic dance where words are unnecessary. The bodies are their own stories, keeping within them the intimacy of a timeless relationship.

“Each of us can find in this music box anything about their existence. It is quite simple, this show, it is a ballad, an homage to our parents and to their generation. For me, it is an homage to my father. There is little text, little philosophy, if but for some life philosophy, which is the simplest of all.”
Il tango delle capinere is a testimony of love for the one’s roots, an ode to life, to its chaos and beauty, that anyone who ever loved, laughed, cries, or lived can understand.