STUPOROSA | Italy Event Single

As Alfonso di Nola writes in La Morte Trionfata, mourning is the set of social practices and psychic processes aroused by the death of a loved one. In the past, mourning was an aspect of social life, a complex system of shared gestures and tears which, through defined codes and ritual practices, allowed the individual to express pain with the support of the community.

The disappearance of funeral rites and communal support leaves individuals confronting loss in a stark, isolated manner. Despite the omnipresence of death in our modern world — evident in events like the recent pandemic, wars, and Mediterranean shipwrecks — mourning becomes an existential condition, a pervasive melancholy difficult to process.

In this context, the performers of Stuporosa, directed by Francesco Marilungo, respond with tears. Unmotivated and seemingly without reason, in this exploration, crying becomes the only conceivable reaction to an inevitable state of mourning. The tears take on various nuances, restrained, suffocated, musical, hopeful, and even transforming into a song that echoes the ancient sounds of a Salento funeral lament. Supported by the Instituto Italiano di Cultura Mumbai, and to be staged at Ranga Shankara, Bangalore, on 18 February 2024, at 7:30PM IST, Stuporosa becomes a poignant embodiment of the complexities of mourning, transcending individual experiences to articulate a collective, nuanced language of grief.