Dov’è più profondo is a performance made of the body, sound and images, the result of a creative process in which practitioners of traditional forms of singing and speech from the host territories were invited to share their musical and cultural heritage. Their voices were recorded, thus implementing the repertoire of choirs and spontaneous singers found in rare archives and collections in Apulia, Piedmont and Valle d’Aosta.

In where it is deepest, overlapping narratives coexist, songs stripped of a single origin and thoughts on identities and traditions freed from the ideal of purity to make room for the imperfection of mixture. There are traces of people present and past, inhabitants of distant places, united by the time of toil and work, sociability and the relationship with nature and history.

We belong to a society that almost no longer contemplates time-spaces dedicated to rituality, except in forms often conditioned by largely flattened imagery. The choreographic creation then summons to itself the power of song, as a place for a possible sensitive sharing between human beings, to analyse and celebrate simple and important aspects of living together.

The territories traversed in pursuing the creative journey are the valleys in the north of Piedmont and Valle d’Aosta, which are also inhabited by the German-speaking Walser communities. Like so many other minorities and cultural marginalities, even geographically very distant from each other, the Walser community faces on a small scale the challenges that contemporary society faces on a planetary scale: issues of integration, separatism, landscape conservation and the transmission of linguistic and traditional identity, even archaic in some cases.

These phenomena and issues are closely linked to the concepts of community, identity and tradition, among the words most often crystallised in the imagination of right-wingers who use them as propaganda tools. Starting from the awareness that identity is a mobile and dynamic thing, one of the questions that started the process is: are we willing to deal with Tradition, or rather to (let) transform this element of our identity, so that it is still and again in relation to the world around us?

The perspective chosen, the only one possible, to work on these multiple paths, is on the one hand that of the dancer who makes her corporeity an instrument as well as a field of knowledge; on the other, it is that of the person born in the Tavoliere delle Puglie, in Cerignola, the land where Giuseppe Di Vittorio was born but, at the same time, one of the territories-full of the despicable phenomenon of the caporalato. The project started from a specific song, a song of struggle, a verse of which gave the show its title.

On stage, a letter is read to the spectators, to share aloud the profound motivations of the creation, and the first of the trigger points of the creative process is exposed.