ANSE is a monologue for multiple voices.
An internal conversation that is crossed by a plurality of voices, a collective dialogue that inhabits a single body. The voice is the only sound input: the entire musical panorama of the story is generated by the live modulation of the performers’ voices, simultaneously narrators and characters, on stage and elsewhere, real and double.
It’s the story of a body portrayed in a world stretched out, told from very close and from the inside – and of the spaces that pass through it.

Precariousness and depression, loneliness. An oppressive, subtle, consumed present – a voracious future that devours the present time. A promise that refers to tomorrow, that makes any today acceptable as long as tomorrow is bright. But that tomorrow does not exist, and the only possibility is to stop, breathe, accept the present and live in this subtle – sub-contemporary – large and ignored space. “Learning to breathe underneath”.

ANSE tells of an ordinary evening, of an ordinary brief phase, a bend in the sinusoid of an ordinary person’s life, from 7:00 pm on a Tuesday evening to 7:00 am the next morning. A person, someone, returns home, through the usual route, but something is missing at home. They are missing. They are missing, they are not there. They are not in the usual place, have they gone away? Thay go out, wander, search, sew, tear: time compresses then expands. The future does not exist, the past has stopped, life flows and pulsates, finally, for an ephemeral or eternal, fleeting or immense instant. Ephemeral and eternal, fleeting and immense.


a performance by Mezzopalco and Usine Baug
from the poem “ANSA” by Mezzopalco
with Riccardo Iachini, Toi Giordani, Massimo Giordani
sound dramaturgy Mezzopalco
visual dramaturgy Usine Baug
collective direction Usine Baug
lighting Emanuele Cavalcanti
sound Luca Jacoboni
beatbox Giovanni Di Matteo
scenographic consultancy Arcangela Varlotta
construction of stage elements Falegnameria Scheggia

production La Corte Ospitale, ZPL, Usine Baug
with the support of the Ministry of Culture, Emilia-Romagna Region, Straligut Teatro

winning show Forever Young 2024 – La Corte Ospitale


duration 55′


Mezzopalco is an artistic formation composed only of voices, part of the Zoopalco Collective. The research is in poetry, centered on narration and orality, in the intersection with singing, spoken word, phonatory techniques, processing and live-looping, through digital and analog instruments. Winners of the 2018 Dubito prize, between 2019 and 2023 they toured Italy with the show “IMPRE”, an oral anthology of some essential figures for the history of the voice in the West. In 2022 the album of the same name was released, produced by ZPL. The new work “ANSE” (2024), built together with the Usine Baug theater company, was the winner of the Forever Young competition and is currently in production at La Corte Ospitale in Rubiera (RE).

Usine Baug is an artistic collective that deals with theatrical research that focuses its research on current political and social issues using fairy-tale or grotesque transpositions as a counterpoint and antidote to pathos. A visual and dynamic theatre that intertwines narration and archive materials (audio and video), tableaux, flashes and cinematic cuts. Intending to create a synergy between the research and languages ​​of the two realities, ANSE was born, a project that inhabits inter-mediality, building various bridges between poetic musical language and theatrical and dramaturgical language. The voice remains the main expressive instrument and only input, but opens up to a more structured and composite theatrical dimension, deliberately and expressly performative, which links the metric-narrative and vocal research of Mezzopalco and the visual and scenic-directorial research of Usine Baug.