The young Alice Sinigaglia tackles François Rabelais' famous satirical novel Gargantua and Pantagruel in a theatrical project that is halfway between a psychedelic journey and a PhD thesis.

The show stems from a collective reading of the first book of Gargantua, which soon turns into a sort of conference entitled La mostruosità nell'opera by François Rabelais. At the centre of the stage are simple chairs: on them, people read, discuss and improvise. The themes of comedy, excess, ugliness and difference are analysed. At times, the boundaries of discourse widen to the point of reaching a critical point: the moment when difference begins to frighten us. We wonder how to resist the discomfort of the grotesque when it ceases to be fiction and becomes real.
But something escapes us. Reflection is distorted, takes shape, becomes experience. The boundary between words and imagination breaks down. The book rebels, swallows its readers and drags them into the heart of the second volume, to chapter XXXVI: there, we literally enter the mouth of the giant Pantagruel. A red-tonsil carpet unfurls, the giant's tongue becomes a red carpet leading into the world of the exorbitant.
A hallucinatory journey begins: winged sausages fight priests with chicken beaks, proverbs stroll around, creatures are born and die in the same instant. We are inside a Bosch painting, in the heart of what was once carnival: the ritual of the reversal of logic, the sacrifice of all sensible forms.