Maria Lai, Maurizio Saiu e il rimosso coreografico

Il sasso e la parola, un caso di studio “archeologico”

Abstract

In the case study discussed in the article, the author focuses on a project that has been little or not at all treated so far in Maria Lai’s artistic biography: Il sasso e la parola (The Stone and the Word), realized in Cagliari in 1991. An event characterized by being almost the only production conceived by Maria Lai in which, thanks to the collaboration with artists coming mainly from the field of contemporary and experimental dance, the scenic performance, although in a simplified operation of “total theater” that summons didactics of art, theatrical expression, visual and installation dynamics, music and poetry, nevertheless assumes an original and removed choreographic importance. A fact that, moreover, connects Lai’s path to that, in some ways analogous in terms of sensitivity and separateness, of Maurizio Saiu, a Sardinian and a historical exponent of new Italian dance.