A Home Outside
Mia Lecomte and Compagnia delle poete
Music of Poetry
Mia Lecomte
Mia Lecomte is an Italian poet and writer of French origin. A translator from French, Mia Lecomte is also known as critic and editor in the field of translational literature. She is the founder and member of the Campagnia delle poete .
The Compagnia delle poete (www.compagniadellepoete.com) was born in the summer of 2009 by initiative of Mia Lecomte. Its members are all foreign or Italian-foreign women poets who write in Italian, each with her own personal history of migration: Prisca Agustoni (Swiss-Brazil), Cristina Ali Farah (Somalia-Italy), Anna Belozorovitch (Russia, Portugal), Livia Bazu (Romania), Laure Cambau (France), Adriana Langtry (Argentina), Mia Lecomte (France, Italy), Sarah Zuhra Lukanic (Croatia), Vera Lucia de Oliveira (Brazil), Helene Paraskeva (Greece), Brenda Porster (Usa), Begonya Pozo (Spain), Barbara Pumhösel (Austria), Francisca Paz Rojas (Argentina), Candelaria Romero (Argentina, Sweden), Barbara Serdakowski (Poland, Marocco, Canada), Jacqueline Spaccini (France, Italy), Eva Taylor (German). During performances the poets are joined by other artists – painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers and actors – who have worked internationally in various artistic contexts and forms.
The underlying idea of the Compagnia is to form an “orchestra” that can harmonize the work of all the poets, influenced as they are by their diverse linguistic and cultural traditions, through performances where the word is supported and amplified by a plurality of artistic languages. The “modular” structure employed modifies and adapts the basic productive formula on each occasion, according to the theatrical situation and the poets who are on stage, with the ultimate aim of bringing poetry back to the public by restoring its original function of shared orality. And of giving a voice to transnational writing, which represents the real literary avant-garde in our century. The Compagnia delle poete has been the object of various studies and dissertations, and is often invited to take part in academic and literary seminars and conferences and in writing and translation workshops in Italy and abroad, on the subject of pluri-language passages between literatures. She is also involved in collective projects of translating contemporary poetry from and to many languages.
A Home Outside
Performance Time: 30 min
A Home Outside – the fourth production of the Compagnia delle poete, before the recent Lesson-breathing – is built around the symbolism of house/home as a place of passage, a non-place of non/belonging. The house that is perennially in construction while participating in an unceasing de-construction – that of our private and collective experience, the existential story of the species, the small stories that make up History. Houses that are always “outside”, other than the self, symbols of mobile frontiers and multiple identities situated at the border of all geographies, destinies, emotions. Houses that are bodies, organisms in mutation, cells where relations and conflicts combine endlessly.
Now A Home Outside will reach another continent. It proves itself still to be home/house, with all doors open, precisely because it extends a welcome to other poets, the voices and poetic languages of the new Indian compagne who in turn welcome us into their homes: into the poetry we have in common, a shared house/home outside of place and time that we inhabit together.
For Kolkata Poetry Confluence, the founder member of Compagnia, Mia Lecomte will team up with Nishi Pulugratha, Devinder Gill and Jhelum Tribedi. Scenography is done by Italo-Venezuelan artist Cesare Oliva.
Nishi Pulugratha
Jhelum Tribedi