A dark line upstairs

Italy, autumn 1951: it’s raining.
Heavy flooding causes the Po River to burst its banks, turning the Polesine area into a huge lake covering 70 square kilometres. People flee without being able to choose what to take with them, they flee so they can return, they return so they can start over.

Autumn 2021: it’s raining. A woman is struggling with yet another house move, she searches through the rooms and decides to take everything with her.
Everything she has.

The monologue intertwines the two stories, the natural and the personal tragedy. Feelings of loss, displacement, the fleeing one’s home on the one hand; breakups, house moves and mortgages on the other.

A monologue about deliberate and unintentional uprooting, about the big and small events that change our lives.

Could we ever really lose everything?

Coming to terms with chaos, with what we cannot control, with the fear of losing everything: A Dark Line Upstairs addresses all these themes through an in-depth study of the 1951 Polesine flood, through the words of those who experienced the disaster at the time and the humour of a woman, today, who looks at her own disaster – both personal and generational, and goes back in history to seek a ways forward.

Alessio Foglia’s sound design is a physical place where Matilde Vigna places her words.
The set is bare, and the sound takes the audience between past and present becoming the event, the environment, the emotion: the rumble of the flood, and the silence it leaves behind.

Duration: 60 minuti