Rimini, Italy
NELLA TEMPESTA
"Our utopist imagination has been dramatically atrophied in the asphyxiating atmosphere of an apocalyptic predication, (climatic catastrophe, energy reduction, extinction of animals species, economic disaster, war for resources) that it seems much easier to imagine a dying world rather a better one. But it is precisely when utopia becomes unfathomable that it is necessary."
Les Sentiers de l’Utopie, Isabelle Fremeaux and John Jordan, La Découverte, Paris, 2011
"What happens now" is the question raised at the end of Alexis. Una tragedia greca, the last performance we built hunting down the traces of an Antigone in today’s world. Alexandra Sarantopoulou, on stage, states that, for her, the key of the answer to this questions lies in a graffiti that some young people did on a wall in Athens:
Ερχόμαστε αττό το μέλλον
WE COME FROM THE FUTURE
They place themselves in the future, because they are the future, a future which Huxley and Orwell had drawn in gloomy colours, but that maybe has some surprise in store?
As a matter of fact, in order to read the present, it is perhaps more efficient to look beyond the line of the horizon of the immediate; since 2011, we have opened an enlarged and visionary front of observation, darting into the intricate landscape of revolutionary writers, philosophers, artist-activists, comic book writers and architects who have imagined (and still try to imagine) the Upcoming Future.
In Brave New World, Huxley describes the process through which we become accomplices of our own enslavement, seduced into submission… And the perfect and inhuman world that appears in the title is a quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest…
"How beauteous mankind is!
O Brave New World that has such people in't!"
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Never could we imagine that the tension towards the future would have thrown us into the opposite direction, all the way into 17th Century… But that’s how it went; reading and rereading this ambiguous work, we have found – transfigured – so many surprising coincidences with many of the questions that have been tormenting us for so long, that we have decided to "throw ourselves" into the tempest… For instance, one of the first lines of the text is: "Where is the master?"
This question bounces between the King and the Boatswain, while the boat is at the mercy of furious waves in front of which the words of a chief are of no use… What cares these roares for the name of King?…
From this point of view, this tempest immediately becomes the storm of a social and political universe to be completely re-founded (and the current Italian political climate is a testimony of this), through the contact with the diversity of an alien island and with the stranger who inhabits it.
The island, in the Renaissance imaginary, is the utopic world as an alternative to authority, oppression, usurpation… a marginal limen allowing or welcoming an upside down world.
But the island is not only the fantastic "Brave new world" described by Miranda, but also an imaginary construction of the playwright’s mind with all the incongruences of its creator-director.
Seafaring and the ship itself evoke, as Foucault has proven, images of marginalization and movement (or removal). One need only think of the Ship of Fools or the desperate rafts full of refugees crossing the Mediterranean…
It is a text encapsulating in its fabric many turmoils, many levels of havoc and many more storms, at the individual level as well as on the systematic one; the economic Macrotempest in which we are immersed, which can always be reconnected to the themes of control and of the unconsidered use of financial power, as well as the Macrotempest impersonating the hostile relationship between different ethnicities, like among the migrant-workers arriving nowadays on the Lampedusa island (which many critics even come to identify as “possible Shakespearian island”)…
Here one also finds the eternal conflict between generations, fathers and sons, which we already faced on our path around Antigone… and, last but not least, the tempest unsettles those who, as they overthrow the relationship between margins and central vision, try to question the principle itself of representation, in their possible relationship of subversion with reality and politics.
Creating a play-within-the-play, Prospero – as Shakespeare does – knows that it is not possible anymore to be only actors or spectators. This alternation or coexistence of roles is indicative of the uncertain, risky mobility of a life taken in an eminent political direction.
This is witnessed by the apprehension of the king/playwright who must leave the island/stage into other hands, other strategies, other kinds of magic, saying goodbye to his own audience with the words: "Let your indulgence set me free".
Even the dramaturgy is fragmented on several fronts; on one side, the study of those mechanisms of "control of the body" has pushed us to meet those "who keep watch", those people who sit at the screens of the surveillance cameras’ monitors, (Prospero and Ariel?), or also to explicitly ask passers-by in the street "Where is the master?" (and getting the most unpredictable answers)… On the other side, we have been brought to gather testimonies by "those who avoid surveillance" (Caliban?), those people who are building strategies of invisibility and libertarian anonymity, moving across today’s pockets of resistance, communities and minority groups who have chosen to live according to other "perspectives", like the one recently founded by the authors of Les Sentiers de l’Utopie in Brittony, quoted earlier on… but also with Russian activists Voina with whom we have shared a period (of their clandestinity) in Italy.
The accumulated material is then "ground" with the actors on the stage, to come to a performance in which also the audience-community will have an active and determining role in order to create a sort of istant city or better, istant community! During the "Nomad Architecture Workshop" that we held at the Fies Factory in December 2012 with different collectives of architects, we asked ourselves: "What is the first shelter after a hurricane, a shipwreck or an armed conflict?"
The most immediate answer was: a blanket.
A blanket is also the simplest object to find and redistribute in every city.
This is how we have found the "set" of Nella Tempesta: only and exclusively blankets, which we will find in every city in which we have a performance. We do not want to waste any more money on "dead sets". Instead, we want to work with materials that, at the end of our tour (or even of every date), can be "donated" to independent spaces of each city so that they can be recycled and reutilized.
Why not trying to transform the theatrical contract into an open formula of reciprocal exchange, as we try to deconstruct from within the proxemics of the relationship between who acts and who watches? We want to use the "temporariness" of the staged event to create a different zone from our life experiences in the nomad, vagabond, unstable and… pirate community that, as "uprooted artists", we are sharing. We, "the Communityless Community, the Community without the We-Community", have realized that the only possible form of community (beyond political activism) is the one we live on the stage, with the audience members of every city in which we move…
"The tempest is not, in this context, a goodbye to theatre, but rather the ground for a new great theatrical proposition… The proposition of a theatre that is not only show but also experience, not only imitation or reflection or suspension or escape from every day life, but life in itself."
Agostino Lombardo, introduction to the Italian translation of The Tempest of W. Shakespeare
Enrico Casagrande et Daniela Nicoló
