As soon as Sicily is spoken of, you hear of a mirage, a myth: mountains spitting fire, a land bearing fruit of undescribable beauty and taste, the sea, women and men. When you have to tell the story of a population, a strange sensation stirs within you, starting from the stomach and spreading throughout your body. The body, the means through which this performance narrates the historical path of the EVIS (the Volonteer army for Sicilian Independence) – one of the most important human aggregation in Sicilian and Italian history. 

The Evis arose as a reaction of the people whose pride had been crushed from years of domination: their aim was freedom. The story of the EVIS has been hidden away in the historical Italian development because of their stand against all domination and all the abuse of power.

We mention some of the salient moments, like the Italian army‘s senseless attack of the starving women and children in Palermo Scenes unfold of the difficulty of a man’s life in the training camp and the unfought battle of Sambuchello, which caused a lot of tragic events, such as the death of Capitan Canepa, the leader of the EVIS.

The performance has an underlying irony and hilarity as it tells us about the life and battles of a group of youths who reacted to the unfairness and tried to achieve freedom. This performance recovers memories while attempting to dress the wounds of a lacerated naked people, a population that no longer has an identity: a performance where sounds, words and movement are fused to re-discover traces of those past days, letting the body be the memory of the time that was.