In Italian, the word “Pupo”, refers to both the child and the puppet: Sofia Nappi’s new piece is inspired by Pinocchio and the theme of metamorphosis of the carved wooden puppet is at the centre of the piece: how does this slow transformation from one state to another happen?

In images inspired by and abstracted from commedia dell’arte, the Italian choreographer asks herself whether the fantastic fairy tale about lies that are punished, a tale which we like to read to our children, may not in fact be a story for adults – it rather frightened her when she was a child. For all its fairy-tale wit, Carlo Collodi’s book, which was published 140 years ago in Sofia Nappi’s native Florence, has a dark, melancholy side. It was the Italian literary critic Alberto Asor Rosa who found it in Collodi’s novel: Does the wooden puppet, in order to become human, completely give up itsself? Does it not lose its innocence, its impulsiveness, by being continually forced to learn from punishments? Isn’t Pinocchio being moulded by society, losing his innocence, his original, perhaps “wooden”, but rebellious will? With each of his encounters, with each new adventure, the four stages of temptation – guilt – punishment – salvation repeat themselves: it is by this way that the puppet learns the morals of human society.

Nappi’s protagonists do not refer directly to the characters from “Pinocchio”, but with her seven dancers she plays with the figures, their types, with the costumes and scenes. Her piece does not tell Pinocchio’s story, but the puppet becomes a mirror for us humans. Is the mechanical puppet at the beginning or at the end of the story? What do we gain, what do we lose when we grow up? Is the price of survival the loss of our self? The piece exhorts us never to forget the child in us, and to reflect on ourselves in the face of the foolish, childlike puppet Pinocchio: how society continually shapes our lives, and how we can better understand ours and others’ conscious choices.