The Dies Irae + Symphony #2 project reasons about the concepts of power, violence and persecution, exploring the breath and the voice as organic and material sources, driven to want to say, to want to exist.

The project involves the performance of the musical composition Dies Irae (1973), almost in its entirety, and parts of Symphony #2 (1979), writings by Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) one of the most important Soviet composers of the 20th century, the living embodiment of the Resistance, nicknamed ‘the woman with the hammer’.

The performance was initially conceived in connection with Dies Irae (a famous medieval sequence attributed to Thomas of Celano) where voice and speech remain veiled in the performers’ bodies and are expressed solely through body language.

With the addition of Symphony #2, the voice takes over in Monica Barone’s body and in the female chorus, suddenly becoming material, demanding, appellative, reappropriating the previously emptied bodies and returning to resonate as the voice of death and mournful, shouted, revealing sound.

The work takes the form of a performative concert, where the soundscape consists of Galina Ustvolskaya’s constantly questioning, absolute and extreme music, with its musical scores composed of hammering and repetitive structures. What emerges is an interrupted, obsessive and stony sonority, capable of erupting into harrowing, strident explosions.

In relation to this force, even the physical and sonorous gestures of these events cannot but be disarming, tragic and absolute. The performers dance to the rhythm of hammers on anvils and sheets of wood and metal.

What is judgement? Where does it come from?
When does power manifest itself?
How does the body experience the concept of judgement, power and violence?
How does it transmit it? Can song, voice, sigh become image?
How can dance translate sound into the body?

With the integration of the voice in Symphony, the performers give life to actions, movements and gestures that allude to a mysterious ritual, moving within a choreography that is structured and severe but always open, allowing for possibilities of encounter, integrating to all intents and purposes with the initial musical score.

If with Dies Irae the choreographic score appears severe, respecting the rhythmic progression of the music, with Symphony the scene opens up: the bodies flow into it, letting themselves be transported by the music, the instruments multiply and the voice becomes part of the ensemble.

The text/prayer of Ermanno il Contratto entrusted to Monica Barone (performer with a physical disability that conditions her phonetics) becomes the image and material of a cry, song, lament, supplication and prayer.

The Voice / Breath remains in the middle, between the only way to say and the question of what to say, the last judgement, the surviving judgement.