Also this year, Alpe Adria Puppet Festival is a partner of the Cantiere Project, which offers new opportunities to emerging companies specialised in figure theatre and is promoted by Festival Incanti in Turin, Insolito Festival in Parma, Festival Arrivano dal Mare in Ravenna, ANIMA IF Festival in Cagliari, and Festival Pendientes de un Hilo in Madrid.
From the 2023 edition, Carola Maternini arrives in Gorizia with ‘Louis’, a story that explores the search for a new balance after a loss. The play stems from a research on the phantom limb syndrome as a metaphor: continuing to feel what is no longer there, who is no longer there.
Isabel Allende wrote: ‘At a certain point I realised that you come into the world to lose everything. The longer you live, the more you lose. First, you are losing your parents, sometimes very dear people around you, your pets, places and even your faculties.’
What happens to us when we lose something or someone we cherish? That is what Louis has to face when he wakes up in the middle of the night. He sleeps soundly, but when he wakes up, he realises that there is something wrong: he is missing an arm! He goes through disbelief, doubt, fear, panic. His, turns into a sleepless night in search of a solution. His own, is the story of the search for a new balance after a loss.
The phantom limb syndrome as a metaphor for another cherished theme: continuing to feel even that which is no longer there, even those who are no longer there. Moreover, connecting this theme to the broader theme of the body can open up a quest that seems to resonate in the contemporary, in the times we are going through after years of health emergencies, times in which the theme of the healthy or sick, complete or amputated body (in terms of the loss of something/someone) is no longer the great absent or the great repressed, but has returned to assert itself strongly.
