Les Larmes de Marco Polo

…This is a story which was murmured. Between the walls of a prison where chance would have it that a man, Marco Polo, has ended up as he returned from a very long voyage, and another man, Rustichello, who would like the story to be made known.
We therefore find ourselves in a story. Somewhere between the authentic and the incredible. With a band of pioneers who set off from Europe for the land of the rising sun and returned twenty-five years later after having touched the Tree which marked the edge of the known world. We are on stage at the exact point where they meet – that is to say everywhere. And we see them learning to approach the Other everywhere, whatever the colour of their language or the mystery of their skin may be.
They sometimes don’t say a lot, when an embrace is what is needed, but fights can also be avoided with a stream of comforting words. They sometimes don’t make many gestures, in order not to scare people away, but they also invent a thousand ways of tricking them out of feeling scared.
So, in order to imagine the first great voyage which opened the routes between East and West, which put an end to the fear of the other, which made the world understand that diversity is an asset, we have used both words and silence, uniqueness and plurality, with all their instruments: dance, text, fabric, the body, the wind, music.
As Jean-Claude Gallotta sets his dance on stage, Marco Polo tells his story in a prison in Venice: with the only means available to him – with his body.
Claude-Henri Buffard