The visit MITEM

It was suddenly, for no one knows why, but he, but the angel found himself flying over the skies of the earth. He knows it well, the village fool remembers it well, for he was the first to see it and the last to forget it.

The angel flies over, full of astonishment, skies he had only dreamed or imagined, until a priest, the priest of that country or what remains of a country, whose scars of war are still visible, shoots him. The priest shoots the angel. Overwhelmed and surprised by this extraordinary being and by his profound sense of guilt, the priest resolves to welcome and care for his guest; an angel, marvellous and ambiguous, who observes with the eyes of wonder that ‘life’, that all-human life. A life, however, that slowly becomes difficult, complex, thanks above all to the hostility of the town that resents the visit of the stranger, of the angel, stigmatising his deformity, his diversity. Gradually weighed down by humiliation and mockery, prevented from returning to the heavenly country and ‘caged’ in the human one, the angel will only find relief in the music of a violin, of which he is a sublime performer, and ‘asylum’ only in the eyes and love of Delia.

The text at the basis of the scenic score, draws free inspiration from Herbert George Wells' “The wonderful visit”, a visionary forerunner of genres and languages, but shifts the axis of its interest from satire against Victorian conformism and respectability, towards a more contemporary critique, which concerns above all the way in which we welcome “those who come from outside”, the foreigner. Whether you are an immigrant or an angel, it does not matter; if you are not like me, if I do not recognise you, then you are a danger.