ESCAPE LINES
.....some circuses work only if there are animals
in a cage
The beasts have obviously what to feed from, but itís not the
same thing as seeing the fierce animals running
in the savannah....
Considering
the diverse and absurd infinity of judgements, prejudices, opinions,
conjecture, dogmas and dreams of manhood
around that beautiful world called THEATRE....
1°) doing theatre
To engage in the path of theatrical experimentation asks for a great
consciousness, a consciousness of one’s means, of what one is
able and wishes to do.
To succeed in such an adventure there is need for different tools,
compasses and sticks for the trip. A theatre play is a complex and
multiform being made by the co presence of elements that are present
and acted with the same importance and the same intensity: text, body,
voice, sound, noise, music, light, object.
The play is born from the assembly of different writings:
Writings that by crossing, joining, interfering some time make a whole
and sole being, a dramaturgic unity and some time they float in darkness
in a sort of cerebral raptus…
2°)
we must face the obscure and secret happenings of our soul
… when passions are wild, when the colours of things, when light,
when the stars, when the fire, when the flight of insects, when the
singing of birds, and the sky, and the sea and the earth and the entire
face of the world, when the mystery that so often we hope to see continuously
possesses us
3°)
theatre is a wonderful machine
Sometimes it works even in a perfect way
But sometimes the machine gets stuck.
It’s the unexpected. You don’t know what can happen:
You can mistake a line, you can get a heart attack or even forget
the text.
Theatre is a wonderful being.
Theatre is a place close to manhood because it’s an active and
quick environment like fire.
Theatre is the free game of destiny’s forces.
4°)
free spirit is also a noble traitor because it abandons every belief,
every faith
We practice a research that is always open and in constant becoming,
that never reaches a finished knowledge since it is born and it develops
amid continuous beliefs and uncertainties. In truth during this research
you can experiment modes and tones, themes and elements that cross
each other with variable force and angle of incidence, but without
an absolute preferred line.
This gives the same research that characteristic tension that can’t
be comprehended/compressed or explained through a method.
So often this intention of control and stiffening can hold us from
understanding the ensemble of all the transforming and events that
are part of the path of existence.
The rools for the construction of a play are formed during the work
These rools can be recognized in the finished piece,
Every time that we reherse, we find things that we would have never
discovered if we had don nothing but thinking.
The view of a moltitude, is as pleasant as many stars, as a multiple
motion, uncertain, irregular, untidy, a vague wave that the mind is
not able to determin nor to definitely conceive.
Technique exists to develop CONTACT.
And contact suggests us to limit the all-comprehensive desire of reason
to try and listen to what a body is capable of.
Our own body is given as multiple, it grows, it shrinks, it passes
through infinite tresholds and in these passages it does nothing but
destrucuring and rewriting language.
A language that is covered by infinite movements, dispositions, shades
and inclinations.
There is a nedd for a sort of will to listen, so that significants
and possibilities can proliferate
We start from different texts, in a sort of crossed and interacted
plot.
Deplacemnt, isolation of the context and recombination in a new ensemble
of material with different sources.
5°)
living the present
The importance is to have style, to have your own way of perceiving
the present times, of seing things.
An immutative and revitalizing character, defined but not coded or
encodable by laws or scenarios.
A self sufficient nature that listens to that unstoppable becoming,
but becoming does not mean to try and describe life, but to catch
its changes, the different shades of intensity, the escape lines.
We get to a prformance not by chance or miracles, but through complex
experiences, through a long developing of positions and expressions
carried strenuosly untill the end and linked dinamically to the experience
of existance that we live.
By seing, listening, speaking, operating every day unseen things,
through the use and the familiarity of fate and satire, we will get
rid of many habits, we will forget many things, we will learn some
more or we will remember and come near to many other, we will see,
we will know and live the present.
We believe that theatre in general is multiple and we moove in this
multiple range of possibilities, directions, senses.
Magic representations mind-body capable of striking, touching and
caressing the most emotional sensations, the deepest feelings: joy,
pain, laughter, crying. There can be no pain without joy, desperation
without hope.
6°)
journey, wandering
Once agian the issue of journey, of wandering, that is chosen as the
antidote to the audience and hit parade dictatorships,....
But to travel does’nt simply mean to move from one place to another,
to visit the mirage of landscapes that remain unconceivable.
A journey is first of all a delirium of intensity, the “nomadic
war machine” that activates the force and power of tought.
Once again it’s time to free life from where it has remained
trapped.
7°)
the theatre as a place of imagination and rapport
A theatre that can bring into play a vast number of tricks and devices
in order to grasp reality, flushing out the crust that surrounds it
and in which it hides.
Tear away our attention from the lowly daily routine and transfer
it to a dazzling scenario of marvellous rapture.
Reality, as such, can never be fully expressed, described or ranked
once and for all.
Reality is the main source of material for the scene. And if modern
man goes to the theatre, maybe to relax, maybe to unwind, maybe because
he needs something that is really liberating because it comes from
outside and he knows what is real, maybe to look at reality from another
prospective. No matter what, those who are “sitting there”
looking at us are those who make our being there right.
What matters is the tension, the will to create the most authentic
rapport possible between those
Who speak and act and those who look and listen.
Extremely anxious, varied and well acted tensions within the lively
turmoil of one’s own era.
A look at the reality of one’s own time, while always being urging
and reactive, always looking for ways to intervene without losing
sight of the complexity and the dynamics of one’s own experience.
The theatre is a system of tensions that is nourished by other tensions
and that contributes to these in a dense and indissoluble circle.
8°)
creating a performance is like creating an ideal world
A theatre that can attack man’s alienation, that can attack not
man but the degraded images (the deceits) of the providential myths
that mystify the human condition.
Against everything that impoverishes and degrades true human strength,
because man is continually
assaulted in his temptations, his failings and his deprivations.
A theatre continually struggling against the ideology of death, never
at peace with the real oppressors of humanity be they sterile, mortifying,
egoistic, calculating reason or providential divinities, in eternal
battle against the most insolent and rebellious blasphemy.
An aspiration towards life and towards its most elementary and its
highest values that give a vital meaning to even the most profound
frustrations.
One can examine various possibilities even to the limits of nihilism
and individualism, but one must always return to an active line towards
the prospect of aggressive tension.
An energetic pessimism inseperable from a persevering battle in the
history of one’s time
Some actions are rather cold and monotonous, but there are actions
and words that even when they make one feel the inevitabile unhappiness
of life, even when they express the most profound desperation, the
rawest and most humiliating disgraces, suddenly awaken an inevitabile
need for redemption.
Pain is still life, boredom is only death!
It is important to understand if we are capable of love on the stage,
because when one speaks of LOVE everything becomes vital and makes
sense.
Love survives the death of all illusions!
A theatre founded on a basis of energetic force and the will to act.
All good things reach their destination by arduous ways.
Without too much meaningless enthusiasm for a new heaven on earth
and aware of one’s human limits (it’s easy to be “against”,
it’s difficult to be “for”!) we still believe today
in researching new forms of expression allied to or better integrated
into local and global campaign movements.
9°) infinite desires and altered visions: prelude to a futuristic
theatre
The world is searching for darkness and finds pleasure in this.
A theatre that expresses the pain of a decadent civilisation, for
the horror of a triumphant coercing society, but also a theatre capable
of representing the impossible.
Because we wish to speak about love - that intimate, spontaneous,
sweet, sublime, mysterious mother of great signs and great toil, a
mother, dear and sad.
A theatre that is basically vibrant, at least in its aspiration, even
when it seems to cave into the weight of impossibility and disillusionment.
Even if only for a moment, even if only through a gesture of a delusion
of grandeur: immagine a world enamoured of light, glorious and brash.
To dare in an excess of love.
The tendancy to recognise a world whose destiny is essentially miserable
and tragic is often confirmed and often accepted in a passive and
resigned manner.
And the world frenzies as it looks for a new order and new laws and
craves perfection.
A society of law and order created to protect us from the barbarians
who are ready to wage war, to oppress and exploit. We need to find
the instruments of freedom.
And these instruments are not mere projections of future mirages,
they are excitement and dreams.
In the near future the life of the mutants in the interstices of the
system will be harder than ever.
We must arm to attack and to strengthen our character, let us try
for once to live without consoling ideologies.
A theatre that is necessary for its vibrancy, its courage and intellectual
and moral intransigence.
In short there is a time for strength, a time for enthusiasm, for
fervour, for excitement, for intransigence, greater danger in the
face of imagination.
10°)
a construction of the world that is neither foolish nor triumphalistic,
but aware of its own limits and difficulties and of the need to risk.
Singular usefulness of dreams
A theatre that is neither spoiled nor corrupt, where tension is not
illtreated or suppressed or suffocated, where, in short, risk and
surprise can be fully exploited.
A theatre capable of asking difficult questions and of avoiding simple
and reassuring answers
A theatre that has, without doubt, already been heard , spoken, but
which is still urgent and inevitable
Such journeys are always undertaken in conditions of extraordinary
freedom and excitement. A metamorphosis of life – the place for
action, power, humour/chaos that explores those areas and those forces
that belong to the construction of reaction/action , they are manifested
in the absence of a precise sense of direction
A style not devoured by the obsession of the audience, or of the hit
parade or by the need to comunicate at all costs.
Every good misunderstanding is a symptom of good health.
One of the interests resides in the movement of construction that
includes the bodies, that opens up to a power of substance, a power
that is produced by thresholds, extensions, affections.
Prepare to follow those escare routes that indicate the occurring
of the present itself.
A personal mature that feels the present and reproduces difference
Natura is instilled into iìour bodies and into their capacity
to strike or to be struck.
Escape as a possibility to explore the multiplied is nourished by
the multiple, by the plural and also by the singularity.
Inevitably, language itself is questioned; language studded by the
movement of the continuous destructurization of the order that has
been struck.
An action that is not easy.
New directions inspired by the fullness of these real visions so a
sto live intensely and vigourously in the present (with the resourse
of our memory of the past) using all ones strength of existential,
intellectual and moral tension..
An area of research emerges whose complexity is nourished by continuous
interaction of a vast and differing range of objects and concepts,
rules and practices, structures and functions.
They unleash in the soul of the observer a tempest, a rush, a bubbling
of passion.
A profound existentialist protest often founded on a pessimistic but
unyielding vision.
SOME PROBLEMS AND SOME QUESTIONS
It is eay to understand how what is the norm in nature becomes new
and surprising in art.
Supervitality (superhumanity) must be brought to the stage
We must single out potential subjects or rather often and quite by
accident, all those who are outside the world of theatre: lunatics,
invalids, alcoholics, rejects, football supporters, prison inmates,
lifers, friends who hate the theatre, neighbours, aunts, dad who,
as soon as he opens his mouth puts his foot in it.
Too much time is wasted working with professional actors because it
requires double work: forst to eliminate all that they have learned
and then to teach them what they must do.
Novelty works wonders and spurs the mind of the spectator and the
listener to those bodies and those voices so that the action becomes
more real.
All this is good because it only nourishes the theatre of the world
in which one lives and moves, but very often similar ideas are expressed
by involving people who are unaware of the processes in which they
are involved…. Because we are so ready to love and desire that
we willingly devour our own intelligence!
Similar choices are faced “arms in hand” and with ammunition
available....
A knowledge of one’s means, of what one is able and wants to
do…
The theatre is an instrument of knowledge, of a wealth of experience,
of contact and above all of authentic rapport.
(Without being too apocalyptic, we want to understand if the theatre
is a means of transformation of experience and in what way)
11°)
technology as an instrument and not as an end
How to use different electronic devices without destroying contact
in its primary characterisation or the fact is we are men not machines.
technology as an instrument and not as an end has been one of the
main questions in many battles for freedom – in the broadest
fields – all through the 20th century. In the theatre too, the
fear of technological innovation has often been transformed into a
reckless use of the theatre of effect (Hollywood theatre)
In order to confront technological innovation valid remedies must
be found:
The stage needs humanity for various reasons:
so as not to be devoured by the technological “monster”;
to oppose (in a system of structured opposites) the super technological
devices, because people must always see themselves in the new fashions
and the new forms;
because novely must be transmitted through them;
because professional actors cannot continue alone, they are ridiculous,
they cause embarrassment or worse they are pathetic, so we must find
this humanity that immediately becomes wonderful, attractive and mysterious.
And what happens then? What reamins with the person who has had a
strong, explosive theatrical experience?
Can the theatre lead to or stimulate u sto overcoming our own condition
and in particolar what do lunatics do after their world tour has finished?
They will perhaps return to their normal everyday life in mental health
instutions, or perhaps they will be so ill at the end of their happiness
that they will undergo some special treatment and start all over again
… or perhaps they will live with the indelible memory of that
experience, or will feel so well that they won’t want to “do
theatre” anymore. Of course we are afraid of television. But
television is like nicotine, it’s like a tranquillizer that we
can’t do without. We know they do harm , we know they are the
devil, (or if we prefer, a sod God) Television is the devil, but it
is part of our lives, we must live with it, it is not enough not to
own one in order to refuse it. Television builds our ‘imaginary,
our common sense, the way we speak and behave. And like all sharing,
there is a peaceful and a potentially bellicous sharing.
We must decide whether or not we are at war, without too many ways
out, otherwise we should go and live in San Juan Chamula( Chiapas-
Messico )
In San Juan Chamula where the population lives in an almost primitive
state, where it is severly forbidden to film daily life with any electronic
device ( videocamera, camera) , where daily life is acted out, for
good or evil, through a violent fracture against the state, the Catholic
Church, and the show business society
By every possible means. The inhabitants of San Juan Chamula would
be willing to die to defend their autonomy, their culture, their truth.
12°
) from the massed individual to individual egoism or better from communication
at all costs to complete non-communication.
A world marked by a lack of depth and by the exaltation of superficiality,
a world that tends to suppress those who are different, emigrants,
homosexuals, aids victims and in the world of arts, in the cinema
and in the theatre it is manifested in the negation of artistic anomalies.
Individual egoism to shake off the obsessive bombarding of the show
business society, rating obsessions, hit parade, communication at
all costs. .
By communicating nothing one makes a tactical choice, a passage to
something wonderful, easy, changing and full of vitality, defined
but not coded by laws and copied modes.
As regards all this and what has already been said, it is easy to
see that many people kid themselves not only intellectually but also
creatively. Otherwise is is a pure catharsis, an end in itself, in
a completely private dimension and without any scope for communication.
A theatre devoured by solitary introspection and removed from the
pull of the whole spectrum of life forces.
A theatre that is alive only in a cathartic liberation of its own
being and repugnamnt in its inevitable isolation.
13°)
There are too many shows that smell like decaying corpses.
We are faced with a theatre that has continued its historical avantgarde
stride and has wished to free itself from the armour of aristotilian
and naturalistic tradition by practicing a radical reduction in the
literary texts, in characters, in narration, and allowing itself to
be modelled on linguistic and formal modifications that have led to
the cancellation of its cultural heritage.
The cancellation of literary memory has been repeated by the historical
avant garde to the extent that by repetition, it has lost meaning
and sense.
The refusal of some traditional theatrical categories (scenography,
recitation, text) have only led to the creation of other equally conventional
ones.
With the result that a systematic destructuring of the theatre is
happening alongside continuous speculation to refound it.
The alternative cannot be a return to the theatrical apparatus, in
drama, in interpretation, by ressurecting dead genres.
We can only navigate!
We refer to the many works where the odour of death is clearly and
knowingly desired.
It is like sharing a secret with someone, it is like giving a present
to a stranger.
WE NEED A THEATRE THAT IS ABLE TO PERCEIVE WHAT IS HAPPENING AROUND
IT:
"We have an avant garde that has become classical and subsidized
by public funds, no longer rebellious or transgressive, no longer
a united movement but fragmented into a myriad of styles, in the name
of virtuosity and professionality.” ( from a tempestuous analysis
of the end of avant garde by Richard Schechner),and so our “task”
becomes harder, and it often happens that the analisys of things is
the death of beauty and of their greatness. (All the decorations of
contemporary society - its morality, taboos, the social institutions,
are dreadded attempts to negate and repress any kind of wonderful
transforming.
And let’s also avoid the philosophical speculations and the sudden
self celebrations of saviors of humanity!
I don’t think we’re willing to dye (greedy as we are of
our hebits and fakeness.)
The individual egoism may have been an obliged choice to get rid the
of the obsessive bombardment of the show biz (the obsession for audinece,
hit pareds, communication at all costs) but not a final goal and definitely
not resolutive concerning the existent, not closed concerning the
infinite possibilities of manifestation.
Theatre is a dynamic system of relations.
A theatre like a lancet to sect society, its proliferating eccesses
and all kinds of injustice.
