The Divine Comedy is an enormous sound box in which vibrate the echoes of several pieces of contemporary writing.
"What takes place here," according to Ossip Mandelstam, "is a struggle to achieve a representation of a wholeness, to give a vision of a mental universe."

He is not the only one to have been haunted by Dante.

A theatrical enterprise evoking The Divine Comedy follows a fragmentary process, going endlessly back and forth between Dante's text and contemporary or recent reflections on it. Ideally, it will be in the form of a virtual dialogue between all those whose imagination has been touched by reading The Divine Comedy. We knock on the doors of Dante to hear the echo which comes back to us.

Dante's poetics leads systematically to the sound, the verbal, the image. The Divine Comedy is magnetized through and through by the parameters of stage design, dramatic art and music. In a way, we are at the beginning of figurative representation, projected into space.

"It is impossible to read the Cantos of Dante without drawing them towards the contemporary period. They were written with this intention. They are devices for capturing the future. They require a commentary in the future," writes Mandelstam.

" ...Who is Dante? What is The Divine Comedy? What a strange feeling of newness we have when we attempt to briefly explain what The Divine Comedy is, the structure of hell, il contrappasso…. " wrote Primo Levi, to speak later of "something gigantic that I have only just glimpsed this very instant, in a dazzling intuition, and which contains perhaps the explanation of our destiny, of our presence here today ..."

The American writer Walter Lowenfels, whom Samuel Beckett knew during the 1920's in Paris, tells how, in 1932, he met Beckett:
"I ended up exploding: "You just sit there, with your mouth closed, while the world is falling to pieces. What do you want? What do you want to do?" He crossed his long legs and answered me nonchalantly:
"I want only one thing, Walter, to sit on my arse, to fart and to think about Dante.""

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