EXCESS OF REALITY
Humankind cannot bear very much reality, wrote T.S. Eliot.
Humans do not have the strength to believe thoroughly in the possibilities in front of them, as if listening to all that exists, or could exist, is too burdensome, too heavy to bear. So the time has already begun, when we are able to realize it: only backwards we have strength enough to look at reality.
Artists, on the other hand, with their gaze towards the past and the future, listen to what is possible, in order to seize what is now; theatre, dance, circus, music, among all the arts, happen in front of us, in an eternal present, made of the concreteness of bodies and voices. They take us where we need to be, they accompany us to a vision that leaves the individual limit to embrace the strength of a collectivity larger than ourselves, which has the courage to become aware of what is real now.
May these days together give us back a clearer lightness to endure the excess that reality has in store for us, regain a lucidity too often lost and a forgotten ethic of living.
Lucia Franchi and Luca Ricci
