Mythomorpho

Mythomorpho is a theatre-and-myth performance by Compagnia dei Folli that imagines a post-apocalyptic society searching for a new beginning.

In a world that has already faced its own collapse, the humanity that remains moves among the ruins, trying to rebuild a community through the rediscovery of ancient myths. Not stories belonging to a distant past, but living archetypes that can still help us understand existence, fear, diversity, knowledge and our need to belong to a community.

In a landscape suspended between memory and rebirth, archetypal figures emerge as guides for a fragile civilisation.

• The forbidden fire of knowledge, stolen by Prometheus, becomes a symbol of the human need to take risks in order to learn and evolve.
• Pandora is reinterpreted through the lens of stigma: the figure of a woman historically cast as a bringer of misfortune becomes an opportunity to question how guilt and prejudice are constructed.
• The Minotaur instead embodies the fear of the Other: the unknown, the hybrid, the different, the excluded. His presence raises a question that runs through the entire performance: who decides what is monstrous, and who is condemned to bear that label?
• Through Persephone, the performance finally explores the themes of loss and transformation, tracing a journey from trauma towards awareness, resilience and cyclical rebirth.

Mythomorpho builds its universe through a predominantly visual language in which physical theatre, stilts, vertical dance, exoskeleton masks, pyrotechnics and fire effects.

The performers’ bodies become symbols, and their transformations create a narrative made of images. Masks and large-scale figures alter human proportions, stilts raise the characters and turn them into archetypal presences, while verticality carries the action from the earth towards the sky. Fire takes on the meanings of destruction, knowledge and rebirth all at once. The performance space thus becomes a threshold between past and future, a ritual place where myth is no longer the memory of a lost civilisation, but a possible map for those who must invent a new world.

In a world that must begin again from scratch, Mythomorpho asks a question: if everything we know disappeared, which stories would we choose to carry with us to build the future?