AMULETS

Are my emotions only mine?
Or are they inherited—passed on through bodies, stories, and gestures?
If I was already an egg inside my mother while she was still inside my grandmother, does that mean we were once one body?

Amulets is a dance trio with objects that unfolds as a tactile, sensual, three-generational ritual. The work grows out of an imaginary conversation with my late grandmother Giorgina about life, love, and rage—particularly emotions that remain unresolved, unspoken, or unconsciously carried forward.

Papier-mâché objects, dancing rituals, domestic gestures, and a layered soundscape become amulets: charged entities that carry emotional residues and presence over time, tracing intersections between personal memory and inherited experience.

The piece explores how emotions often coded as feminine—such as grief, care, and forms of anger perceived as excessive when they disrupt expected roles—are carried and transformed across generations. Drawing on my relationship with my grandmother and mother, and on post–Second World War Italian contexts, Amulets weaves together historical and folk references, dream logic, and embodied listening.

Rather than seeking resolution, the piece proposes dancing as a way of staying with what lingers: a practice of attention, imagination, and repair, where inherited pain is not only remembered, but moved with.

Amulets is not a closed work, but an ongoing choreographic research project that continues to unfold through new residencies and collaborations. The 2023 dance trio was its first performance version and introduced many of the project’s central questions around intergenerational memory, grief, care, anger, ritual, and inherited emotional life. At the centre of the work remains the amulet itself: as a carrier of magic, layered meaning, and emotional residue, and as something that can hold, transmit, and transform relation across time. Over time, the amulet has become not only a theme in the work, but also a method — a way of thinking through how dance, sculptural objects, and sound can each function as charged compositional elements. The current development of Amulets includes scenographic research with Ulla Eriksen and a new sonic collaboration with Lorenzo Colombo, extending the project while staying connected to its original core.

Credits
Choreography: Alice Martucci
Dance: Andrea Deres, Alice Martucci, Inaja Skands
Sound: Joelle McGovern
Cardboard Objects: Ulla Eriksen in collaboration with Alice Martucci