Asteroide

Geology and romance have one thing in common: they tell the story that things last a long time. The absurd hypothesis of an asteroid that would lead to the instant extinction of all dinosaurs shocked the scientific community in the 1980s: no one could accept a story that was so terribly fascinating but at the same time too improbable. The same incredulity of those who suddenly find themselves without a lover: it is difficult to accept that life can change direction so suddenly and cruelly.

In Marco D’Agostin’s new show, the figure of a mysterious palaeontologist presents himself to the audience to discuss bones, extinctions and cosmic material. It soon becomes clear that something is not right: his phrases reveal sentimental details, the posture of a limb takes on a bizarre choreographic pose, the pronunciation of words increasingly resembles singing. A threat looms over the scientist’s body, as terrifying as the trajectory of an asteroid: it is the musical, the most paradoxical and exhausting form of entertainment, which seems to want to destroy the lecture in order to test the ability to dance and sing the tale of the end. 

In a hand-to-hand battle with Broadway, D’Agostin’s populariser/performer gives life to an unprecedented duet that pairs science and love, entertainment and information, life and death, dance and theatre. Between betrayals, dinosaur bones and mysterious caves full of iridium, Asteroid recounts the extraordinary capacity of life – and therefore of art – to always reappear, in new forms, without ever giving up. And we living beings, continually called upon to rebuild ourselves after apocalypses – which in a vertiginous reversal D’Agostin invites us to observe as if they were always behind us – are proof that we build ourselves up layer by layer, like the fabric of the earth, and that our biographies are small geological eras destined to leave something behind.

Duration: 80 minutes