I can’t go back to where I used to be.
A wondrous place.
Every turn a surprise.
Walt Disney, Aladdin
Lea Moro performs the big gesture of musicals with simple abstraction. She embarks on an extravagant path alone and shares her vulnerability with the audience. She moves through the empty stage space on roller skates and so develops a powerful yet fragile language of singing and movement. The standard ways of directing musicals, such as the use of emotionality, stage effects, virtuoso numbers and catchy music are all transferred to a single solo piece. Set to the sound of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (1725), Lea Moro sings her way through her musical.
Again, as in her previous pieces Le Sacre du Printemps, a ballet for a single body and (b)reaching stillness, she uses classical music. Without ever naming it, The End of the Alphabet deals with the moments when familiar states come to an end. These situations and the feelings linked with them are the stuff of Moro’s solo-musical. We are denied a clear narrative structure, an atmosphere that we can easily grasp and a soothing happy ending. The End of the Alphabet creates a dark, yet humorous space for ambivalent associations, confused impressions and melodramatic scenarios.