Lucia Calamaro's La Vita Ferma Explores Memory of the Dead

Italian director Lucia Calamaro stages La Vita Ferma (La Vie suspendue), a play examining how the living remember the dead. Following her 2011 work L'Origine du monde, portrait d'un intérieur, Calamaro presents three characters—Ricardo, Simona, and their daughter Alice—who navigate daily life while grappling with Simona's death. The white, empty stage, surrounded by boxes, becomes a mental space where memory surfaces and fades. Objects like boxes, sheets, and plastic flowers serve as remnants, while colored marbles create an unstable floor. The dialogue, delivered by actors Riccardo Goretti, Alice Redini, and Simona Senzacqua, resists silence to combat forgetting. Simona, dressed in floral gowns, dances like Loïe Fuller and sunbathes excessively before her death. As the play progresses, Ricardo's guilt diminishes, and he and Alice lose Simona's grave, eventually mourning an unknown tomb. A transparent curtain embroidered with flowers falls, signaling the end of grief and leaving the characters in search of their own identities. The work premiered in 2017.