Can storytelling still save a life? Can a woman who tells stories finally share her own as well?

A king, after being betrayed by the queen, decides to marry a woman each night, only to kill her the next morning. Shahrazàd, offers herself as his wife and, together with her sister Dunyazàd, devises a plan to survive the sultan: before she falls asleep, Dunyazàd asks to Shahrazàd to tell her one last story that must not end before dawn, and if the ruler wishes to know the end of the tale he must grant her a new day of life. Shahrazàd, by telling wonderful stories, thus ends the chain of executions. This is the story in which the tales of The Arabian Nights are framed. The project is set on the night before the wedding. Five women try to telling a story, always the same, their own, that of Shahrazàd. They interrogate the now to discover the unexpected hidden in the everyday, rediscovering the feeling of wonder as a vital principle. They work on the creation of a character who has always hidden behind words. They bring to light the complexity of the feminine, from childhood to old age, putting themselves in the first person. And they do so by crossing many languages: starting from literature, they use tools from anthropology, play to mix elements of figure theater (puppets, shadows, puppets, marionettes) and experiment with new sound worlds. The wonders of the tales of The Thousand and One Nights materialize in out-of-the-ordinary images, constructed from fantastic objects in their own personal Wunderkammer. The wonder cabinets of the 1700s were collections of objects that gathered the richness of nature and human activities; exotic worlds for questioning one's place in the universe, losing oneself in contemplation, opening the door to utopia and enigmatic paradox.

Director's Notes

The play explores the relationship with death. Shahrazàd, immersed in her study, is afraid, wishing she could find a way to avoid being the next link in the chain of killings. Together with her sister, she retraces the story that triggered the sequence of death in a performance that blends live music, shadows, puppets, and words from The Arabian Nights. On stage, the sisters animate a man/puppet with music to experiment with their relationship with the male; they lose control and are forced to kill him. As in an anatomical study, bones surround the protagonist and hark back to the search for her origins and knowledge of man. Their shadows postpone to a transfigured world that contrasts with reality. Animal bones compose a puppet, a magical creature that symbolizes the memory and legacy Shahrazàd will leave to her sister.

The audience is accompanied to the hall from a sound installation in the foyer that broadcasts women's voices in various languages. Voices that intersect with those of the protagonists, re-proposing the relationship between singular, dual and plural present in the Arabic language and immerses the audience in a feminine and disturbing world.