Abracadabra

“Francesca Pennini’s return to the stage destabilizes the spectator, playing with their expectations for dozens of minutes, only to then strike them with poetry, pain, and surprise. [...] Once again, the artist from Ferrara demonstrates a pure theatrical talent, a sense of direction as the language of wonder: Abracadabra, CollettivO CineticO is back, and it is a truly beautiful magic.”
[ Andrea Pocosgnich - Teatro e Critica ]

“In the clamorous age we live in, the exercise of silence and disappearance should become part of our good daily habits. Attending CollettivO CineticO’s new show, Abracadabra, can be helpful, almost a therapy.”
[ Roberto Giambrone - Danza & Danza ]

“Abracadabra speaks to us with lightness and poetry about that fragile boundary separating reality and fiction, lucidity and madness, the power of imagination, and the capacity to regenerate after a fall.”
[ Roberto Giambrone - Il Sole 24 Ore ]

“Francesca Pennini’s latest work is a sincere, intimate, personal, and powerful act that disorients and enchants. [...] A word that shakes, exploring the soul’s fragilities and cracks with grace, delicacy, and poetry. Sanguineti said that 'words are hands for things you cannot touch,' [...] and Pennini succeeds perfectly, constructing an effective, evocative, and lyrical textual and physical dramaturgy. Abracadabra disturbes and captures; it makes you lose the thread only to find it again many times. It is a punch to the gut, a painful and true act, posing questions without claiming to give all the answers—which perhaps are not that important. [...] Emotion is inevitable, and perhaps this is the true magic of theatre: the place where everything is fake, but nothing is false.”
[ Valentina Scocca - Teatro.it ]

“A magic that is more than theatre. A magic that is more than words. A magic that is more than a body in motion. [...] On stage, the body disintegrates and recomposes, the voice becomes gesture, light writes and cancels the boundaries of the visible. The spectator does not merely attend, they are sucked into an enchantment that forces them to look with other eyes, to question what remains when the body vanishes. What CollettivO CineticO stages is much more than a simple theatrical performance; it is a work that leads to a deep reflection on being or not being, on the invisible as a possible space. [...] Abracadabra is not watched: it is lived. It is a ritual of transformation where disappearance becomes dance, and the magic—the real one—happens when we find ourselves still there, spectators and bodies, within the same spell.”
[ Amelia Di Pietro - Teatrionline ]

“To Be or Not To Be, that is the solution! The scenic device of Abracadabra is constructed as a laboratory of apparition [...] Then, obviously, there is the game of theatre, the ability of the CollettivO to organize scenic devices in an always surprising way. [...] Pennini & Co. rework the meaning of everything in a narrative key (and this is the first time it happens in this way), inserting Abracadabra into the wake of a broader reflection on the possibility of speaking the real, where the use of the first person and the construction of the autobiographical story assume, in this context, a value that is not so much documentary as ritual: the stage as a place for the re-enchantment of language, where the 'telling of oneself' is an act of symbolic reconstruction. [...] It is the generative power of language, baby, its ability to produce worlds.”
[ Renzo Francabandera - Paneacquaculture ]

“But, even in the voices that seem to arrive from the borders of madness, a sense of rebirth remains and, we can say, a form of possible happiness. [...] And the world, as Wittgenstein said, is exactly everything that happens, inside and outside the stage, in that dimension of overcoming all separation between theatre and life, which is typical of CollettivO CineticO’s shows. Moments in which art speaks directly to us and, above all, about us.”
[ Leonardo Merlini - Askanews ]