Maria Casado

Show & Culture

Agata Vulcano Show Often, suffering shatters or consumes in silence. Like that of Agatha of Catania, a saint, alone but coveted, wanting to dedicate her life to the spirit but confined to the image an arrogant man had of her virgin body, sent to a brothel and tortured. Or, on the other side of history, like that of Maria Casado, long devoured by a foreign desire. After Agatha refused to submit, her breasts were cut off and, one year after her last stifled cry and her last bloodshed, Etna erupted. After Maria refused, the necessity for a performance was born. The contemporary artist gives voice and substance to the ancient martyr through dance, sounds, words, and her presence. She joins with and unites herself to the volcano. The more the dream of her body perishes under the low fire of torture, the more the reality of her mind rises towards the lava and the crater. Body and mind fall asleep at the same instant, in death or in stone. From a saving eruption, a hybrid body is reborn, marked by suffering but recomposed, covered with breasts as armor, linked by chains as wounds. At the end, the audience ritually assimilates in communion the organic and spiritual force of the tormented recluse, a creature transformed by her own telluric story in motion, as well as that of the artist, liberated from her torment and silence.