Four Rehearsals On One Stage is structured as four consecutive rehearsals rather than four finished acts. Each begins with a framework, but Dino repeatedly disrupts it through improvisation, memory, physical action and encounters with the audience.
Drawing on fragments of his life as an Italian immigrant in London, difficult relationships, paranoia, masculinity and the repeated experience of failure, Dino turns autobiography into unstable performance material. Stories may begin as lived experience but become exaggerated, contradicted or reconstructed as they are performed.
Influenced by Italian Neorealism and its attention to ordinary life, the work shifts this relationship onto the stage. Everyday experience becomes material for fiction, while fiction provides a way of approaching experiences that resist straightforward representation.
Rehearsal is therefore not preparation for the work: rehearsal is the work. It allows Dino to fail, repeat, improvise and change direction in front of an audience, leaving unresolved where Norman Mine’s lived experience ends and Dino Desica’s constructed identity begins.
Performance: Dino Desica
Presented at: Croydonites Festival, 2025
Photography: Lukasz Izdebski
