Synopsis
P’som Sett is a theatre piece born from an investigation I’ve carried out since childhood: observing the animal world as a key to questioning myself.
The work takes shape as an existential exploration of the relationship between human beings and animality, challenging the boundaries between species. The human derives from the animal, and yet fears being one. It is no coincidence that in metamorphosis narratives it is humans who turn into animals; the opposite rarely happens. It is the human who looks back, longing for a lost condition. The animal, instead, does not aspire to humanity. Animality remains there, a life that coincides perfectly with itself, and the animal is content because there is no gap between the life it lives and the life it would have wanted to live. Its existence is full, wherever it is: swallows chase each other in the sky above the roofs of a small village just as they do among the buildings of a suburb. The context changes, but the movement remains. And in that movement, life is always whole.
Artistic research
P’som Sett unfolds as a backward journey shaped through a vocal and choreographic score: a passage in which the human being does not transform into an animal as a form of regression, but rather recognises animality as an original and still‑present dimension. The reference intertwines ideally with the Kafkaesque imaginary, overturning its perspective: if in metamorphosis the body becomes a prison, in P’som Sett the body opens as a space of possibility, escape, and transformation.
On stage, a composite body emerges — made of fragments, traces, and memories of many species. A body that is not unitary but layered, inhabited by multiple forms of life. Animality thus becomes a lens through which to observe oneself, a condition in which no gap exists between what one is and what one does. Gesture coincides with being.
The dramaturgical and choreographic research focuses precisely on this quality of full presence, rooted in the present; movement and speech arise as necessity, an authentic emergence born from the body as a living archive of memory, desire, fragility, and strength. P’som Sett tells the story of a human being capable of recognising themselves as animal.
Credits
2026
Cocept e direction: Iris Pesenti
With: Iris Pesenti, Agnese Bocchi e Tobia Scarrocchia
Production: Bocchi/Scarrocchia Compagnia Teatrale
