A first glimpse into the project

Daniel Proietto — A conversation on LIFE

Recorded during the development of LIFE at Palacio Libertad, Buenos Aires.

A MOTHER AND A SON

LIFE is a performance created by Daniel Proietto with his mother, Rosa Segura.

Rosa is 70 years old. She has spent a lifetime close to art and culture, but has never performed on stage.

Daniel has spent his life there.

For the past six years, across Argentina and Brazil, they have been meeting through conversation, writing and the body — looking at what passes between generations, often without words.

Memory. Fear. Care. Silence. Ways of protecting ourselves. Ways of relating to one another.

And the possibility that what has been inherited does not simply have to be repeated.

LIFE begins inside this relationship.

Not as an attempt to reconstruct the past, but to ask what a mother and a son can transform together in the present.

THE BODY REMEMBERS

At the centre of LIFE is the understanding of the body as a living archive.

We inherit more than stories.

Experience travels through gesture, posture, attention, silence and the ways we learn to approach or withdraw from one another.

Over six years, Daniel and Rosa have developed a shared physical practice rooted in breath, flow, awareness, Tai Chi and Qi Gong. These practices are not used as an aesthetic language for the performance. They create the conditions for listening, trust and presence.

Daniel is not teaching Rosa to become a dancer.

Together, they are finding the conditions in which she can enter the stage as herself.

This process has allowed them to approach deeply personal material without reproducing the experiences that caused it. The focus is not the representation of trauma, but what can happen around it: how a body can reorganise, how a relationship can change, and how connection might be rebuilt.

WHAT WE INHERIT

LIFE does not divide the world into simple categories of victims and perpetrators.

Personal histories do not exist in isolation.

Families are shaped by the societies around them: by political and economic structures, gender, history, fear, shame, violence, care — and by what one generation is capable or incapable of giving to the next.

The project asks what becomes possible when we look not only at the wound, but at the systems that allowed it to travel.

Not to excuse harm.

Not to erase responsibility.

But to understand repetition deeply enough that something else might become possible.

THE WORK

LIFE has been developing for more than six years through periods of research and residency in Argentina and Brazil.

The process has generated more than 400 pages of conversations, memories, reflections and writing, alongside an evolving body of physical and somatic research.

Some of this material will enter the performance through text. Some through movement. Some may never appear directly on stage, but remains part of the history carried by the two people standing there.

The work grows from this accumulation — and from the gradual process of reducing it to what needs to remain.

ON STAGE

LIFE is conceived as an intimate performance for two people: a mother and a son.

Movement, text, breath, silence, light and sound form a shared dramaturgical space in which the relationship itself becomes the central material.

[TO BE COMPLETED FOLLOWING THE CURRENT CREATION PERIOD: key scenic situations and a more concrete articulation of what the audience encounters on stage.]

TOWARDS REPAIR

LIFE emerges from experiences of trauma, but does not seek to reproduce them.

There is no reconstruction of traumatic events and no interest in exposing pain for its own sake. Instead, the work turns its attention towards what happens after: how we carry experience, how patterns pass between people, and whether those patterns can change.

The same practices of attention, regulation and care that have allowed Rosa and Daniel to approach this material together also shape the encounter with the audience.

The movement is towards understanding. Towards connection. Towards the possibility of repair.

The question is not simply:

What happened to us?

But:

What do we do with what happened? And what do we choose to pass on?

BEYOND THE STAGE

The life of LIFE extends beyond the performance itself.

Workshops, conversations and embodied practices accompany different stages of its development, opening aspects of the research to communities and creating spaces for listening, movement and exchange.

Rather than asking participants to disclose personal experiences of trauma, these encounters centre on accessible practices of presence, bodily awareness, attention and relation.

The project is currently developing these activities alongside the artistic creation, while building connections between its international trajectory and its future life in Norway.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

LIFE is now entering its creation phase.

Following six years of research, writing and embodied practice, the accumulated material is being transformed into a complete stage work.

Further development periods continue throughout 2026, alongside the creation of the scenic language and the project's workshops and encounters.

The project is being developed in dialogue with international partners including:

Palacio Libertad — Buenos Aires

Maison de la Musique de Nanterre — Paris

The Coronet Theatre — London

Further partnerships and presentations are currently in development.

SUPPORT & PARTNERSHIPS

We are building the partnerships and support that will allow LIFE to develop with the time, care and continuity it requires — on stage, through workshops, and in dialogue with the communities it encounters.

If you would like to support, host or become part of the development of LIFE, we would be glad to hear from you.

Follow the project

Stay close as LIFE continues to develop.

Contact
[email protected]
www.know-nation.com

Know Nation
Operagata 61A
0194 Oslo, Norway

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