At a certain point in Mary Shelley’s novel (London, 1797–1851), the creature stops asking to be loved and begins to desire that those who have rejected it suffer as much as it does. Love converts into hatred and the maker’s benevolence toward his own creation, like that of society toward those excluded from it, reveals itself as a premise of violence. Shelley published Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818, as a narrative experiment on the limits of science, inspired by the investigation conducted in the eighteenth century by Erasmus Darwin on the reanimation of dead matter and by galvanism.
Motus, “Frankenstein (a love story)”, photo © Andrea Macchia, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
In this Gothic novel the figure of the monster, an expression of fear toward technological development, embodies the atrocious condition of one who, born already wrong in the eyes of the world, learns to know themselves through the gaze of those who reject them. The narrative structure of Frankenstein describes with an almost clinical precision the mechanisms – today extremely topical – through which societies produce their own monsters, frightening them, repelling them and then marveling at their violent reaction. Shelley’s anomalous being, in fact, is not born evil: it is curious, capable of love and desirous of belonging, but becomes a monster because no one can consider its attempt to exist admissible. It is neither enemy nor predator, but someone to whom happiness has been denied with a systematicity that has every appearance of a project. Motus, a Rimini-based company founded in 1991 by Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò, engaged for over thirty years at the boundary between theatre, performance and installation, has recognized the full urgency of the Shelleyan myth in Frankenstein_diptych (love story + history of hate), performed last weekend at the Arena del Sole theatre in Bologna in the complete form of the diptych.
Motus, “Frankenstein (a love story)”, photo © Andrea Macchia, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
The first episode, Frankenstein (love story), 2023, performed by Silvia Calderoni, Alexia Sarantopoulou and Enrico Casagrande, explores the solitude of Mary Shelley and her characters through three figures (the writer, the creator, the creature) fused into a single symbiotic entity, a hybrid body ghettoized and frustrated by the impossibility of relationships. The set design is essential, composed of two load-bearing elements: a backdrop-screen in which the shifting of monochrome lighting marks the succession of the twenty chapters, made explicit by textual notes, into which the dramaturgy is divided, and a refined system of transparent curtain-sails that transform the stage into a living organism, as active as the actors in structuring space and action. This part of the piece interweaves the account of the genesis of the nineteenth-century novel and the intellectual and emotional development of the literary monster, relating their parabolas and suggesting further analogies with contemporary stories of marginalization. Here the unforgivability of exceeding the norm is explored, and the tragedy of stigmatized otherness, emphasizing the prescience of Shelley’s novel in anticipating the fractures of our time.
Motus, “Frankenstein (a love story)”, photo © Andrea Macchia, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
Particularly successful is the direction’s calibration of the visual and sonic components in constructing the narrative, placing them in a syntactic relationship of equality with the actors, who are themselves almost split between a plastic gestuality and a spoken delivery assimilable to a voice-over. Beautiful is the scene of the fateful final pursuit across the Arctic ice, the last stage of the hunt for the monster in which the scientist, exhausted by his own desire for revenge and redemption, dies without having completed the task of killing it, having first entrusted his memoirs to the captain of the ship that rescues him. Here Silvia Calderoni, in the role of Doctor Frankenstein, seems in the struggle to merge with the glacial landscape materialized by the curtains, in which the annihilation of the self by totalizing obsession takes effective shape. Weaker, by contrast, is the balance of the textual section which, by leaning too heavily on the theatricalization of the historical figure of Mary Shelley engaged in writing the novel, drains force and space from the possible actualizations of the monster filtering through the various “deviancies” that lend their attitudes onstage to the Shelleyan creature, and attenuates with Gothic mannerism the admission that «we have become a cannibalistic species that devours all others».
Motus, “Frankenstein (history of hate)”, photo © Andrea Macchia, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
The second episode, Frankenstein (history of hate), 2025, detonates the consequence of rejection by pushing to extremity the moment in which tenderness implodes and the monster appears because it has been rendered such by the contempt of others. The structural backbone of the performance is the film produced with the support of Italian Council 2024, projected across the entire backdrop, set among the Calabrian unfinished buildings, such as the ecomostro of Stignano or the Ex Sir bridge, the unfinished structure of Lamezia, and sun-blinded beaches with no geographical designation. In these desolate settings, the creature (Enrico Casagrande) and Doctor Frankenstein (Silvia Calderoni), dystopian survivors of a global disaster, move exhaustedly. In extreme conditions and consumed by the same feelings, the monster and the civilized man seem to exchange roles until they become indistinguishable. Physically present on stage, Tomiwa Samson Segun Aina and Yuan Hu multiply the narrative and temporal planes, interacting with the video and filming themselves in turn to project in real time details of their actions onto other screens positioned on the stage.
Motus, “Frankenstein (history of hate)”, photo © Andrea Macchia, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
The relationship between rescuers and rescued (inevitable here to think of migrants and their helpers given the marine setting) is also overturned in its standard configurations through the respective personifications of Silvia Calderoni and Tomiwa Samson Segun Aina. The visual planes refract further in a series of video interviews on the theme of hatred that follow one another on one of the smaller screens, amplifying the nested-box game of the narration with references to current geopolitical events. Holding everything together is an engrossing underground clubbing soundtrack that makes one want to lose oneself in the cathartic journey toward the abnormal undertaken by the characters on stage. The mixing of original dramaturgy, movement research, video and sonic composition in a format reducible neither to conventional prose theatre nor to visual art performance is one of the founding markers of Motus’s poetics, which here confirms the capacity to «transform their own history into a living archive capable of regenerating itself and generating new paths», as one reads in the motivations for the awarding to the Rimini group of the Premio Speciale Ubu 2025.
Motus, “Frankenstein (history of hate)”, photo © Piero Tauro, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
That Motus has chosen Frankenstein as material for this historical moment sits coherently within its thirty-year trajectory of civic engagement and formal experimentation aimed at finding the point of maximum convergence between poetics and political urgency. The same company in Come un cane senza padrone (2003) and L’Ospite (2004) had given voice to Pasolini’s alarm calls, with MDLSX (2015) had anticipated the debate on gender identity with a precision that public discourse took years to reach, and with Alexis. Una tragedia greca (final act of the project Syrma Antigónes, 2009 – 2011) had reread the Greek crisis as a tragedy of civil disobedience. Frankenstein_diptych (love story + history of hate) slots into this lineage with the maturity of a company that has refined over time its capacity to interrogate, decompose and recompose myths in order to restore what the present asks them to illuminate. The creature rendered monster by systematic rejection is the figure our present produces in series (in non-conforming bodies, in unrecognized subjectivities, in alterities perceived as threat) and Motus brings it to the stage without consolation and without moral, with the cold lucidity generated by the awareness that the monster is not the exception but the symptom.
Info:
Motus. Frankenstein_diptych (love story + history of hate)
Arena del Sole — Sala Leo de Berardinis
via Indipendenza 44, Bologna
14 – 15 March 2026
Upcoming dates: https://motusonline.com/homepage/#tour-anchor
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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