About TUTTO BRUCIA
“With each new creation of Motus, there are questions that remain and that they pursue through the theatrical resource as political and poetic activism. The tragedy of migrants is one of these themes.[…] A play that carries with it a trans-feminist manifesto, announced at the end by Hecuba (Silvia Calderoni), which opens up the possibility of a new world, founded and raised by strong women, with a voice and much to say. It is also a hymn to transformation, to reconnection with nature, to attachment to those vital issues that are part of the landscape of the planet we are destroying.”
Claudia Galhós – Expresso – 5th October 2022
“A lunar play, because perhaps we have turned the world into an uninhabitable place like the moon. A play that takes Euripides’ The Trojans as its starting point to say things about the darkness of our world. Motus is one of the most interesting companies on the European stage. It makes dark and animalistic pieces, plays that are concerts, dances on fire.”
Javier Hernando Herráez – Teatron – 28th September 2022
“With Jim Morrison tragedy met rock. Motus grabbed Nick Cave for the myth, shook Artaud to give us Antigone, and now Tutto brucia, that Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò extract from Euripides’ Trojan Women with Sartre’s pure words, is an authoritative scenic and sound bonfire.”
Rodolfo di Giammarco – La Repubblica – 16th September 2021
“In Tutto brucia the two performers become bearers of tensive epigraphs, of a hypertrophic and ruinous phonetic gesture that shows the nakedness of the bodies and their surrender to destiny.”
Paolo Ruffini – liminateatri – 26th September 2021
About RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN
We are born inside a stream made of images, words and sounds where everything is already a trading good and a signifier. Nothing is authentic anymore, and yet nothing is hopelessly lost. Because the great bet of Rip It Up and Start Again is that in the midst of all this retro passion it is still possible to find a longing for something absolutely new and unique.
Pietro Bianchi – Dinamo Press – 07th June 2019
Motus do not stand as theatre veterans with a magical knowledge, but they cohabit the scene instead […] and cooperate to the writing alongside the students. They do not convey the bodies of the youths in a recitative mode, nor do they box them in a saleable product: they let them free to be themselves, to present themselves in the simplicity of a disruptive routine.
Luca Sant’Ambrogio – Ktapp’s Last Post – 12th June 2019
The 15 young performers alternate at the microphone, they stand with their faces and voices, to make the rush of a race to the last karaoke resonate – a race that raffles the most desired prize: self-assertion, the struggle for existence and a transgressive resistance.
Alessandra Pace – Milano Teatri – 10th June 2019
Press review RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN
About PANORAMA
A wonderful melting pot of ethnicities and cultures, everybody is a migrant. Mixed somatic traits spread on the screens, in the center and on the two sides, while there is a feverish activity at the tables on the scene sides. The entire world gets composed. To the point that Panorama becomes a political shout for the people’s right to be what they feel they are, right where they want to be.
Mariateresa Surianello – Il Manifesto – 3rd November 2018
A corrosive intelligence which claims the freedom to transition, the right to non-belonging and to our irremediably mixed condition and declares that a place guaranteeing this freedom already exists: the Theatre, which is by definition the space of the nomadism of the self, of multiple and complex identities, without borders, a welcoming shelter.
Anna Bandettini – la Repubblica – 6th May 2018
We are taught from childhood, if we’re lucky, that individuals are never merely the sum of their biological and sociological parts. But I have rarely seen a warmer or more engaging example of this defiance of statistics than “Panorama” […] You always leave a Motus production feeling you have spent time amid an ever-multiplying throng. Everybody onstage contains multitudes. […] A strip tease in “Panorama” inevitably involves taking off a whole lot of layers. Once you hit bare flesh, though, you have by no means arrived at the end of the process. The shape, texture and color of that skin may offer some clues to the person within. But by now you’ve learned — more deeply than any ethics class could teach you — that surfaces are only the beginning, and that skins are made to be shed.
Ben Brantley – The New York Times – 12th January 2018
Motus returns to one of its favorite haunts, La MaMa in the East Village, to consider the possibility of a world unfettered by nationalism — and, heck, even nationhood — in the sprawling performance piece “Panorama,” which suggests that to migrate is simply to do what comes naturally.
Ben Brantley – The New York Times – 11th January 2018
Motus, as a touchstone of contemporary truth-telling, is ferocious and unflinching.
Bob Schuman – Stage Voices – 11th January 2018
Animation, dance, music, and cheetos bring to life an infinitely imaginative world dominated by curiosity instead of borders. Panorama culminates in a dizzying and dazzling palimpsest of cross-body experiences leaving the audience gleefully unsure of where they begin or end.
Adil Mansoor – Contemporary Performance – 10th January 2018
The show uses complex technology (video projections combining live feeds and recorded footage) in a way that feels organic throughout, but also has plenty of moments that feel decidedly scrappy. This paradox makes for incredible theater.
YesBroadway – 7th January 2018
About ÜBER RAFFICHE (nude expanded version)
As children that end up being unable to tell reality apart from fiction, blending art and life in their imagination, thus in « Über Raffiche » the spectator finds himself bewitched and unable to make an apparently logical gesture: that of standing up after having realized that the selfsame action is being repeated for the second or third time. […] In other words, the spectator is enthralled by the dramaturgy and wishes it would never end. An example of this adult magic which only theater can create, because only theater directly connects the performers’ emotions to the public’s emotions.
Wlodek Goldkorn – L’Espresso – 17 July 2017
The complexity of the atlas outlined by the vision and the writing of MOTUS is met with a determined directing choice which turns repetition, motor stereotypy, irony and hyperrealism into its strong points. […] The ability of the actresses to navigate among the elements of the score, the different speeds of the script, the rythm of the music and the reactions of the public, mesmerizes and leaves the spectators glued to their seats.
Joele Sahel Schiavone – L’Amletico – 14 September 2017
The wait is made lively by a growing climax, which is probably never carried to the extreme, yet includes a peak and an ending. These two elements, that are so opposed to the wonderful and endless suspended wait, to the enjoyable and insatiable growing rhythm, produce a break that is in sharp contrast with the loop effect.
Manuela Rossetti – Krapp’s Last Post – 19 September 2017
About MDLSX
Silvia Calderoni must be made of mercury, or some improbably liquid element that has yet to be discovered. Surely no body of mortal flesh could undergo the quicksilver transformations achieved by this remarkable performer in “MDLSX,” a perceptions-scrambling work from the Italian revolutionary theater troupe Motus.
Ben Brantley – The New York Times – 10th January 2016
I fell in love with a glossy lyricism that shines with fluorescent reflections, fleshy and inebriating colors; it seduced me with an exploded and embracing intimacy that subjugates distraction, gags it and forces it to watch.
Lucia Medri – Teatro e Critica – 4th September 2015
Motus works on today’s open faults in a dense historical and cultural fabric, as they try to rethink the tools and the practices of theatre. […] The traits of Silvia’s character dissolve in a theatrical character, whose gender is fickle, because this is that to which the actor has been submitted, since the dawn of time. […] Motus and Silvia Calderoni remind us with disconcerting power that, once in character, the actor is neither male nor female.
Jean Louis Perrier – Mouvement – 4th August 2015
On that slope one slips towards a heart of darkness that tells the difficult conquest of one’s own identity, outside of stereotypes and prejudice. That’s how we can make theatre in a political way.
Gianni Manzella – Il Manifesto – 25th July 2015
A work on borders, music, the body, a gunky self, the image projected on a round on the back wall, that re-evokes and unveils details -like in glorious Rooms– that deviates, brings elsewhere, a giving oneself between truth and fiction, between waste and calculation, that asks of the audience to let themselves go on fire, to succumb, to put order back in those strong sensations, those just as strong conceptual stimuli, those existential slaps, those uncertain borders.
Massimo Marino – Doppiozero.com – 23rd July 2015
… the audience remains hypnotized, moved, surprised, not so much because of the undoubtable formal beauty of what we see on stage, but more because of the performer’s extreme and radical courage. And also because of her talent, that brings together an almost animal spontaneity (since always one of her greatest gifts) and a quasi maniac control of each gesture and movement. […] It isn’t exhibitionism, on the contrary it is a radical embodiment (without the self-destruction that sometimes accompanies these kinds of performances) of one’s own gender identity.
Wlodek Goldkorn – L’Espresso – 22nd July 2015
About NELLA TEMPESTA
[…] the Motus Theater Company of Italy is the most truly revolutionary troupe in town. […] Nella Tempesta, which runs through Dec. 21 at the Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa, is a full-throated cry to the young and disaffected to get off their collective duffs, shake off their shackles and do something. Conceived and directed by Daniela Nicolò and Enrico Casagrande, this production turns a cast of six and an assortment of blankets into an 80-minute youthquake that seems likely to leave even cynical audience members shaken and stirred.
Ben Brantley – The New York Times – 12th December 2014
BEST BET…A mind expanding new production from Italy’s Motus Theatre Company that masterfully illuminates contemporary political and climate change issues alongside text borrowed from Shakespeare.
Keith Paul Medelis – Theatre Is Easy – 15th December 2014
An act of resistance not to get lost in this damned storm.
Paolo Cervone – Il Corriere della Sera
Unconventional and provoking, for some irreverent, for most engaging, poetic and moving; in one word, Motus brings on stage, with Nella Tempesta, the last leg of an international creative process constantly hanging between past and future, and where classical masterpieces serve a reflection on the deformations of the present.
Roberto Canavesi – TeatroTeatro.it
Italian company Motus proposes an incursion in the lands of utopia, of dream, of theatre, but also of a certain activism… the initiators of the project and performers multiply the mises en abyme, but also attempt to gently awaken our social conscience.
Lucie Renaud – lucierenaud.blogspot.com
Motus assimilated the lesson of the Living Theatre, but also made it pertinent to our contemporary cultural and media landscape.
Laura Gemini – Dars
About SYRMA ANTIGONES
For me, the biggest revelation this year is the ferocious Italian company Motus, whose Too Late! (antigone) contest #2 takes a series of well-worn parts (acting school animal exercises, modern spin on a classic text, meta-commentary) and plays them with such abandon and skill that they feel fresh. Acted (with supertitles) by two swaggering performers, Silvia Calderoni and Vladimir Aleksic, it boils down Greek tragedy to high-stakes power plays communicated in visceral theatrical gestures. It begins with a very tight hug that in an instant encapsulates the mix of love and violence that characterizes the relationships onstage.
Jason Zinoman – New York Times – 12nd January 2011
Motus’ poetics has been transformed as no other theatre group’s has. From fixation on the glamour aspects of our society (so called glam was the buzzword of the eighties) to technological experimentation (I’m thinking about shows like Twin Rooms), to Fassbinder, right down to yesterday’s Racconti crudeli della giovinezza [Cruel Tales of Youth], a play that grows in your memory. It’s no surprise that Motus today offers us a variation of Antigone. There has clearly been a “political” evolution.
Franco Cordelli – Corriere della Sera – 19th December 2010
They lay siege to non-places in the outer cities or they stage different expressions of political anger, from Genet, Pasolini and Fassbinder to Antigone today. They dissect the texts, fragment them, the better to make the events speak which are shaking our world. The Italian company Motus is asking us direct questions.
Bruno Tackles – Mouvement – October-December 2010
Motus seem to be really listening, able to note this willingness as a new urgency and to explain it, both interpreting the world by means of authentic theatre research and seeking to clarify and understand what their position might be in this world.
Paolo Randazzo – Dramma.it – 13rd August 2010
Refusing to do theatre that is sheltered from the world or to assume that “the outside doesn’t exist”, Motus adapts its formal research to the deterioration of the moment’s explosive political and social situation, making the theatre a place of memory for reflection as well as for action. Having become creators on the European scene who cannot be ignored, the members of the company Motus, poets of urgency, should be seen without delay!
Catherine Robert – La Terrasse – February 2011