The obscure camera and its light

Inspired by Roland Barthes’s essay Camera Lucida, the scene is an (almost) empty room, inhabited by 4 characters. In the essay, they are; the subject, the observer and the photographer, but they are joined here by the director projecting his interiority on them and on the space – as on a white canvas. The director remembers, pines and dreams in a superposition of images blurring the border between thought and reality. Camera Obscura is inspired by this play of mirrors between real images and mysterious interiority. The audience will start by thinking they are watching a movie, then they will sink into a space inhabited by the performers’ bodies, dancing to evoke memories and emotions, concretizing a story of loneliness and intimate, personal grief. The empty room doesn’t have any physical walls nor any way out; it is an indefinite place, a suspended reality that the audience can watch through a thin veil, sometimes disappearing sometimes sheltering the room with ever-developing images. Artificial light fills the room intensely, drawing its borders and transforming it from the inside.

Between dance and theater

Taking inspiration from Barthes’s essay, Michele Pogliani draws us into “an ancestral trip in the mind”: three characters, three performers interpreting different facets of himself with their dance moves, active bodies representing past memories in today’s visible world, guiding the audience into a dreamlike investigation, watching the scene as they would observe a bunch of photographs of unknown people, giving free rein to their imagination.