Man or woman? This is the question that “MDLSX” revolves around. Silvia Calderoni presents a masterful gender performance that transgresses beyond gender binaries; it undermines and blurs these borders in order to show how absurd their construction really is. The actress takes us with her on a journey to the core of ourselves, reaching beyond definition and categorization. “MDLSX” is both biography and fiction, a mix of theory and Indie music, DJ performance and home video. The camera, which Calderoni often operates herself, is merely an external eye. Although it is relentlessly intrusive, its perspective remains superficial. It cannot wholly capture the more complex inner truth that “MDLSX” evokes. At once fictional and personal, this piece searches for new forms of identity formation. Silvia Calderoni, who has been a member of the radical Italian theatre company MOTUS for ten years, uses “MDLSX” to experiment with DJing as a form of theatre. Just like a priestess, she stands enthroned behind her Dj podium – a harbinger of a cult of fluid gender identities. Man or woman? In the end, you will feel like reformulating the question in order to ask: does it really matter?

MOTUS is an independent theatrical group founded by Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò in 1991 in Rimini. It does not conceive borders between countries, genders and artistic forms. MOTUS has created theatre shows, performances, installations and workshops featured in the most important international festivals. The company celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2016.

The group burst onto the scene in the nineties with productions wielding great physical and emotional impact, and has anticipated and portrayed some of the harshest contradictions of the present day. MOTUS has experienced and created hyper-contemporary trends in the theatre, performing authors such as Camus, Beckett, DeLillo, Rilke or their beloved Pasolini, leading to their radical reinterpretation of “Antigone” in the light of the Greek crisis, or Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, with fragments by Aimé Césaire, which powerfully evoked the tragedy of emigration and created instant communities around the world. After exposing the ‘scandal’ of the body and sexuality in “MDLSX” – with the extraordinary Silvia Calderoni who has been working with MOTUS since 2006 – the company went back to a work produced in 2002, “Splendid’s” by Jean Genet. The piece toured internationally and was awarded the Ubu prize for its original setting, a hotel room. The 2016 version of the work is different: it has been transformed to an all-female cast with an original text by Magdalena Barile and Luca Scarlini.