In a square space, at the center on low tables, there are two pots and all the necessary ingredients to make minestrone. Around them, actors and spectators are seated on chairs. Rather than a performance, it’s better to think of it as a meeting, a piece of time, an hour of time lived poetically, seeking what exists before words and what remains after they’ve been spoken and forgotten. A slice of life for all the things to be told: about love, about theater, about the strength of plants and the energy of animals, about how easy it would be, after all, to be happy. In a time of wars, a performance to tell the story of love. A performance to rediscover the meaning and pleasure of play. A performance to imagine the present.

DIRECTOR’S NOTES

« We are over sixty years old, we’ve known each other since 1978, we’ve been living at Ariette for thirty-five years, and our company has just turned twenty-eight. Years made of months, days, hours, and minutes. An endless time, an eternity, a moment.
It’s the journey of life, the search for identity. It’s the answer to that first question: who are we? Who are we? Paola and Stefano, or you and I, actors and spectators, us as a group, society, the masses?
We are a MINESTRONE. Like a minestrone, we are made of water. We are more than a mix of forms, species, and genres. We are relationship. We love, we suffer, we make war and peace. Our actions have made and continue to make the world, not alone, of course, but together with everything else.
And Theatre is one of our actions, like working the fields, transforming food, observing reality.
Relationship changes things. Water and flour, in encounter, lose their respective identities and find a new one called bread. Carrots, potatoes, beets, and zucchinis do the same. They meet in a pot, inside the boiling water, and will never be what they were before; they will only retain a memory of what they were. Now, together, they are becoming a stew.
In the same way, we enter and transform in the magical space of the Theatre. The ‘I’ becomes ‘we,’ my story becomes yours, your life becomes mine.
The space is a square, empty. In the center, two pots. On low tables, almost on the ground, there’s everything necessary to make the minestrone. Around us are the actors and spectators, sitting on chairs that define the square.
And then there are the things to say, to tell, about love, theatre, the strength of plants, and the energy of animals; about how, in the end, it would be so easy to be happy. In this time of wars, we’ve made a performance to tell of love. Perhaps it’s not quite right to call it a performance. We prefer to think of it as a meeting, a piece of life, an hour of time lived poetically, seeking what exists before words and what remains after, after they’ve been spoken and forgotten. Waiting for the stew, a dish so humble and everyday that it belongs to the life of all. ».