Silvia Costa Dans le pays d’hiver

In Dialogues with Leuco, Cesare Pavese takes us on an astonishing journey into mythology. The director and artist Silvia Costa has adapted the work for the stage, creating a visual and poetic variation in which the driving force of our reflections and dreams is that of the image itself.

Written between 1945 and 1947, Dialogues with Leuco was, in the eyes of Cesare Pavese, his most important book. However, its publication divided critics, no doubt because at a time when realism was reaching its peak, the book’s return to Greek mythology and use of poetic language made it stand out. Dans le pays d’hiver explores the fertile breeding ground of existential questions and symbols offered up by six of its dialogues - The mystery, The mother, The beast, The he-wolf, The deluge and The Gods. Birth, the error of our ways, punishment, our animality, the threat of the deluge and how the gods view our humanity are themes that the artist transforms into visions, carried along by a dialogue between words, bodies, and objects, in a constant concern for the beauty of the metamorphoses. In the face of a world stuck in the mundanity of communication and data, Silvia Costa believes in the force of poetic invention as a means of breathing new life into our imaginations. Author, director, performer and set designer, Silvia Costa is a protean artist who, in parallel with her personal research, has participated in the majority of Romeo Castellucci’s creations, both as performer and artistic collaborator. Seduced by both the infinite number of possible reinterpretations that mythology permits, and the elegance of Pavese’s words, she has extracted from his work the foundations of a theatre and visual-based journey, nourished by the visual arts.
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Estimated running time : 1h15
Performed in Italian, with French subtitles