Ave Monstrum

”…How can divinity adhere to the sketch, how does the formless become paradise?” _ Victor Hugo
The second performance of the project Investigations into Monstrosity, Ave Monstrum interrogates the concepts of monster, enemy fear and incompleteness, as well as divine and prodigy by drawing on the Latin etymology of the word monstrum. A possible journey is thus outlined between two apparent antitheses: monstrous and sacred, making the performance a danced ritual a magical act that reveals to us the opportunity to recapture the sacred as a vital principle, between possession and ecstasy, between liturgy and magic. In this journey within a territory where opposites blur, the mask becomes the key to access places of the unconscious and the unseen; through its mutation and that of the costume, the monster is revealed in a fluctuating and unresolved motion, inhabiting a borderland, an immobile present where no time exists. What happens when a creature of shadow is exposed to light? Does the mask change when it knows it is being watched? What if what scares us the most is the very “prodigious” part of us? How can we be extraordinary, revolutionary and “miraculous,” monstrously unique?

Ave Monstrum is a child of Europe. It was born in 2020/2021 thanks to international residencies in five nations (Iceland, Germany, Finland, France and Italy) within Perypezye Urbane’s DanceMe UP project co-financed by the Creative Europe program of the European Union and the Mic – Ministry of Culture. Thus, the creative process was nourished by the encounter with different places and cultures.