Playing Memories | seconda residenza

The cast, made up of seven Italians, one Brazilian, one Sri Lankan and two Georgians from the Tblisi State Conservatoire, spent 15 days in artistic residency at the Conservatorio Alfredo Casella, in the city of L’Aquila, with the aim of creating a performance combining music, dance and visual arts.

Forty minutes of performance, a brief span of time suspended between past and present, where memory takes centre stage. Playing Memories is an immersive experience, a visual and emotional experiment in which the timeless melodies of great Italian composers resonate beneath the fingers of a jazz ensemble, which reinterprets them in a new, contemporary and vibrant form.

But it is not only music. It is movement, gesture and overlapping images that tell a story.
Dance intertwines with the notes, images merge with bodies, and together they recreate the most iconic scenes from eight masterpieces of Italian cinema.

Every dance step, every musical note, every visual brushstroke becomes a call, a play between what has been and what might be. Playing Memories reveals itself as an ode to memory, to the magic of the cinema that has marked entire generations, and to its immortal music, which has helped spread the Italian identity around the world.

An experience that does not simply bring the emotions of a film back to life, but invites us to look at them with new eyes, to feel them as though it were the first time, to remember them as though it were the last.

Playing Memories is a co-production that brings together the Saint Louis College of Music, the Tblisi State Conservatoire and the Conservatorio Alfredo Casella di L’Aquila. A collaboration that, like the performance itself, becomes a bridge between cultures, disciplines and generations.