The only obsession everyone wants: love. People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.

Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

Lacrimosa by Simone Zambelli is inspired by The Dying Swan by Mikhail Fokine with music by Camille Saint-Saen, and is centred on the fascination with death and rebirth. Based on this dichotomy the show reflects on the end of love, an impulse that brings us back to our everyday loneliness. The swan is lost, consumed, it’s a passing image, a memory. What remains is a body without wings, naked, wet, without the will to fly once again. Left on the ground, like all things around it, the swan becomes once again a human body, imprisoned within domestic walls. How do you survive the end of a love story? How does one experience that sense of numbness, that apparently inescapable condition? How does one prepare to recover and rebuild a body that reconnects to life? In a place where absence becomes an active practice, bustling, the present time processes the past and reiterates its memories, in the obsessive advance of a myriad of words, gestures, images, which can perhaps only help fill a frightening void.