The artistic starting point of the company counts on the possibilities of the existing inventory consisting of the unformed identities of actors: their inhibitions and ambitions. From these beginnings to the full sense of particular scenes is a short way. What you think you say; what you are thinking about you do not say. Actors and spectators should meet in the zone of shadows where every judgement of good and evil is uncertain and where there is no certainty but just a non-artificial honesty determines the coefficient of the wisdom. They say their projects have no end - none of them is ever finished nor starts again. Through them they speak about what we are, what is inside us, modes of existence, questioning that what we mix in ourselves every day - sense and insanity, strength and weakness.

The two pieces mPalermu and Carnezzeria won the UBU prizes 2002 and 2003 (prize of Italian critics), and Emma Dante continues to collaborate successfully with her company, so she is considered nowadays as one of the most appreciated directors in Italy .

mPalermu in Sicilian dialect means "in Palermo", with the sense of "in the heart of the city". Five members of the family prepare to go out. They prepare themselves, deck themselves out, put on the most precious clothes they have before they expose themselves to the eyes of their neighbours and co-citizens, to their whispering and gossip.

At the doorstep, Mimmo, the head of the family, notices that Rosalia has unmatched shoes. Mimmo goes mad and refuses to allow such sloppiness: what will people say! They will think he can't afford to buy her decent shoes. He'd rather cancel a long-awaited night on the town than expose himself to such a humiliation. The scheme repeats: every time they try to go out, an incident, a complication or a misunderstanding will postpone the encounter with the world outside.

Every character addresses the audience asking why they are looking at them and judging them. It is the look from the dark that inhibits the most. When finally nothing is in the way of the family going out, Fate will intervene and definitely confine them to the pitiless embrace of the household .

The actors do not establish a vertical hierarchy: grandfather - father - child, rather there is a bustle, a horizontal intolerance, typical of the deconstruction, the crisis of the rustic mentality. It is an image of an outdated society that defends itself with hypocritical strategies that are dominated by a ritual conspiracy of silence, the 'omerta' . Their show is about this silence and a thundering social schizophrenia.

With this play, Emma Dante rose to convincing, serious theatrical offers. The wide public adores her, the critics talk of the authenticity of a concept that rejects all superficial identification. Epic and fabulous, full of strong gradations; the rituals of memory and the living speech of a body set free that tolerates the youthful restlessness, in search of a horizon of minimal utopian reason. A terrace and a cellar of a beautiful city, an emblematic space of self-satisfied impotence and the rotting of the entire polis.