Text by Sofija Digam
I sometimes dream of a world where I would feel comfortable to not speak perfectly each language that I must interact with. I sometimes dream of a world where everyone could do anything by knowing a language piu o meno, without needing to meet the one-way standard of the Goethe exam or the Cambridge Language Certificate. Or a world where all people say: «you speak so well!» — but write I di merda, beh cosa posso farci velocemente? Poco niente. Studiare una lingua è un full time job — hai mai sentito dei linguisti? I sometimes dream of a world where I would have no reason to feel insecure walking into a classroom, into a party, a job or a theatre … the fear of not understanding and the fear of being misunderstood. But what if I could see a world where my accent wouldn’t be met by expressions of surprise «ma che brava!», but by a hug and a «Welcome», in any language that may be? Are my insecurities mine only or should the world be a bit kinder, a bit più morbido, a bit more solidary?
Today we go to theatre.
A theatre unknown to many, but experienced by some here. A theatre where the story that is being told is less of a moment of sentences and thoughts and more a moment of noises and associations. Ma se gli altri stanno ridendo ahahahhaha, rido ahahahhaha anche io? Certo che rido ahahhahha — senza decidere se rido ahahahaha. When I don’t understand, rido ahahahaha e basta. This can be sad, but it can also be beautiful and interesting, intriguing and fun. Let’s try to keep it fun.
Andiamo a teatro!
Sasha goes to theater. At the entrance: «Gruozi». «Grüezi» answers the person at the door. Sasha smiles, shows the ticket and goes in. She looks around the Sala, looks down at the ticket: no seats, sit freely. «Decisioni! No!» She breathes in. «Okay okay, al centro». And so, Sasha goes, makes some people stand up to proceed to the centro: «Scusi, scusi». She sits down. The lights go off, che lo show abbia inizio!
Everything becomes quiet, «khhk khhk» – someone coughs for the last time before it really starts; khhk khhk– proibito. The music slowly starts. It’s a melody that Sasha has heard before, but can’t remember when or how. Concentrati! An actor runs onto the centro of the stage. He positions his right foot in front and his left foot parallel to his hips. He makes a smooth gesture with his hand, with his eyes facing the ground, reminding Sasha of her Italian literature teacher in liceo. He would always sit at his desk during interrogazioni, watch down on the desk and call with this smooth hand gesture for the next person. That was years ago, and yet, it remained such a familiar gesture. Even the smell of the classroom comes back. A smell of harsh “manly” deodorant and cigarettes. They were reading Montale and Sasha can still remember some of those lines:
Ho sceso, dandoti il braccio, almeno un milione di scale
e ora che non ci sei è il vuoto ad ogni gradino.
Anche così è stato breve il nostro lungo viaggio.
Il mio dura tuttora, né più mi occorrono
le coincidenze, le prenotazioni,
le trappole, gli scorni di chi crede
che la realtà sia quella che si vede.
[…].1
What is more beautiful and cruel than a love poem about loss? Maybe that was the moment that Sasha first fell in love with poetry, that time that they were studying Montale.
«Shhh, please» the neighboor says. Sasha realizes that she had accidentally muttered the words to herself. «Sorry». Other actors have come onto the stage. What are they saying? Stanno litigando, she guesses. Are they really fighting or are they having a discussion. Linea sottile. Is there a difference? The gestures are pointy and straight now. Irritati. Sasha must think about gestures.
A drunk man, that was wondering in front of her favourite bar, told her once about his recent calculations. The story went something like this: If we count from the first person that appeared on this globe, around 80 billions of people have step their foot on this globe after the first, and it would be very difficult to imagine that each one of these people would have had their unique repertoire of gestures. «It’s arithmetically impossible!» He shouted at Sasha, or not Sasha – just shouted to everyone and no-one. «There is no doubt: on the world there is way less gestures than individuals!»2. Already in that moment, Sasha had to think that probably he had read that somewhere, or heard somewhere, it was a great calculation.
Little thoughts are original. Individuo, individual, identificante, individuale, identity, unico, individual, singolare, identità… Everything I think, I should cite and cite properly. «These are not my ideas completely, maybe some connections are new, but even those probably not». I was reading this text on Poetics of Hyperrealism in class two weeks ago, and there it was, plain and simple:
I don’t think that there’s a stable or essential «me». I am an amalgamation of many things: books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, televisions shows I’ve watched, conversations I’ve had, songs I’ve sung, lovers I’ve loved. In fact, I’m a creation of so many people and so many ideas, to the point where I feel I’ve actually had few original thoughts and ideas; to think that what I consider to be “mine” was “original” would be blindingly egotistical.3
And even in that moment I was thinking to myself: this is a known thought to me. And thinking back enough, zoning out completely during class – similarly to Sasha during the theatre that she is watching right now –, I realised where I internalised these doubts about identity and individuality: from a movie, «Cloud Atlas». A character says: «Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future»4. «We are bound to others», my memory remembered it as «we are made by others, and each of their crime and kindness makes us». Not exact. But appropriate. And probably I could go on and on, citing every sentence or even word in this text. Many of them I can think back to specific moments, others just are. From where? My teacher in middle school was talking to us about mythical creatures. She told us that at anything we look, we will just see an odd combination of something that already exists. Nothing is invented from scratch. And there I was, at home after school, looking through my book of Greek mythology and realised: a centaur was just a man and a horse, a unicorn was just a horse with a horn, a siren was just a woman and a fish tail. All became so simple and far away from magical. All we think about is something that is already known — nothing we can imagine doesn’t already exist somehow. How is anything invented? It is all limited and then there are just infinite combinations.
Concentrati!
Sasha looks at the stage again; she was watching this whole time – but did she really noticed and understood? In her own way. It is a love scene now. Veramente? Love can appear in such different ways, «and the most honest appears in the most subtle ways», Sasha thinks to herself. «Se fosse veramente amore questo che vedo, probabilmente non lo capirei, non so cosa si stanno dicendo, non so cosa sta succedendo». But look at the way they look at each other. Could it be resentment, possibile? But then Sasha looks at the way they are moving, at their gestures. The way they move similarly to each other.
Mine (journey) still lasts, and I no longer need
coincidences, reservations,
traps, or the scorn of those who believe
that reality is what one sees.5
I believe that we often copy others because of love and appreciation. I start talking differently once I meet someone new that I start adoring, or if I spend a lot of time with a good friend. I unconsciously copy their gestures, their words and thoughts — I start appreciating «new» perspectives, I start making new food that they once cooked for me — inizio a parlare con un accento italiano più forte appena sono circondata da italofoni.6 And so we create our unique” «identity» — una collezione di momenti, memorie, esperienze, conversazioni, amori, incontri, lezioni. There are many combinations, and little ideas! And so is theatre experienced by Sasha sitting al centro della sala. Non capendo il tedesco, la lingua del testo, il pensiero vaga in posti curiosi e misteriosi.
My friend once told me about going to the theatre in a language they didn’t understand. They said: «In those situations, when I am far from any kind of translation – or don’t have access to one – I actually appreciate it. It frees me from the semiotics7 and I can experience everything more phenomenologically8. I’m just swimming in this little sea of information that might not fully connect or register. I feel like the audience always wants to understand – we all have that desire to understand. But when you’re watching something in another language, there’s a different expectation: that you won’t understand it, at least not verbally. So whatever you do understand or connect with, there’s no final point you’re trying to reach. You stop searching for that one message. There’s much more freedom to detach from language and receive the experience in other ways, like something unfolding in front of you.»
I responded: «The opera, for example, doesn’t expect its audience to understand the text completely. So, quello che succede is that it invests its energy in many other elements – emotional intensity, live music, facial expressions, even makeup that has to be seen from afar. But spoken theatre is different. There the performance relies on the audience understanding the language. The text, the language, is central.»
And they said: «Exactly, language is semiotic. It carries a much more fixed meaning than other elements of theatre. So, if you take that away, it might open up interpretation beyond what the artist intended. You might arrive somewhere completely different.»
Then I thought: When you find yourself far from home – especially within Europe, or even within Switzerland, where multilingualism is part of everyday life – it would be beautiful if theatre sometimes expected an audience that doesn’t fully understand the language. What if I could be in a world where my accent wouldn’t be met by surprise like «ma che brava!», but with a hug and a welcome, in any language that may be.9
Sasha’s neighbour in the audience makes a «clap». There is always a first person making the first clap. It’s an art, it’s a skill, Sasha thinks. E poi parte in tutta la sala «clap clapppcllaaapclapclapclap clap clap clap». And the whole place gets submerged in applausi. E anche Sasha inizia ad applaudire.
- Montale, Eugenio. 1971. Ho sceso, dandoti il braccio, almeno un milione di scale. Milano: Mondadori. ↩︎
- Kundera, Milan. 1990. L´immortalità. Page 17. Milano: Adelphi Edizioni. ↩︎
- Goldsmith, Kenneth. 2011. 4. Toward a Poetics of Hyperrealism. Page 83. New York: Columbia University Press. ↩︎
- Wachowski, Lana & Tom Tykwer, Lilly Wachowski. 2012. Cloud Atlas. Warner Bros. Pictures. 172´. ↩︎
- My translation from Italian to English of “Montale, Eugenio. 1971. Ho sceso, dandoti il braccio, almeno un milione di scale. Milan: Mondadori.” ↩︎
- A talk with a friend and flat mate, Hendrik Lohse ↩︎
- = fixed symbolism and meaning / def. semiotics: the study of signs and sign-using behaviour. https://www.britannica.com/science/semiotics ↩︎
- = experience based / def. phenomenology: the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ ↩︎
- Conversation and interview with keshia palm — a mix of direct quotes from the interview and some passages that have been edited to suit the written format (with keshia palm’s permission). ↩︎
08. April 2026
