Last year, the poet Cosimo Ortesta gave me an edition of Mallarmé’s Hérodiade in his own magnificent translation. After hearing me read several excerpts from the work in public, he urged me to consider a possible staging. Almost contemporaneously, Francesco Giomi, with whom I had already joined forces several times in the past, asked me to propose a new project to develop in collaboration with Tempo Reale. Thus, ’S’ as in Salomé was born in the form of a “musical picture” in which the voice is the “theatrical body”. The theater of a voice at the mirror, the dream of a voice reflected in the linguistic and sonorous images of Stéphane Mallarmè. Erodiade, the witch-maiden, utters a monologue rent by continuous incursions (from the Sonnets and from Pour un Tombeau d’Anatole, from vocal writing rooted in the terse madness of the text and from an electronic sound score that nourishes the imaginary body of the poetic language). The voice, the body of Erodiade, seeks itself in the music of the word. We sought to follow it through the forest of Mallarmé’s signs, collecting from it the tiny seeds of priceless irony that open to the present and to life.

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