Little Episodes of Everyday Fascism - event #6
Inquiries on Pre-paradise sorry now by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Ex Manifattura Tabacchi, Modena
28/10/2005, 
19:30, 23:00 29/10/2005, 19:30, 21:30, 23:30 30/10/2005, 17:30, 19:30
devised and directed by Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò
with the assistance of Marco di Stefano
literary and musical consultant Luca Scarlini
with Dany Greggio, Nicoletta Fabbri
video walk-ons Silvia Calderoni and Gaetano Liberti
sound editing Nico Carrieri and Enrico Casagrande
video Daniela Nicolò and Simona Diacci
production Motus
with the support of Arboreto di Mondaino, CANGO-Cantieri Goldonetta Firenze, Festival Inteatro Polverigi
duration 1h20'
After Pasolini, in the close future we need to face authors and playwrights who are very concerned with what is happening here and now, with the small episodes of everyday fascism, we are all victims of, in the complete unawareness. Silently. In a vacuum. Like guinea pigs.
Fassbinder was thus inevitable. Interpreting an author’s writing, penetrating his world, talking to the ghost, who, like Pasolini had always different roles and traits (writer, actor, director, movie-maker…), still means travelling along a winding and unknown route, which needs time and cannot be resumed in a single play.
This is something we are used to, even if - this time - the work is intended to rediscover the freedom of movement and action, which was typical of our early years of activity, when we were based anywhere and people welcomed us in their performing spaces, working light-heartedly and flexibly; this is what we want to do again now.
This project will thus be evolving on the spaces and in the cities that will be opened to it and will possibly involve actors, who will take part to a free workshop and they will help – in many ways – the realisation of the final „show“, as a unique and unrepeatable event.
We chose as a reference a text which is – according to us – more and more puzzlingly relevant, despite its scarce popularity: Pre-paradise sorry now (1969), written by Fassbinder at the beginning of his career and dealing with some of the crucial subjects later reported in his movies as well as in many other theatre plays, Katzelmacher - to quote just one. Sarah Kane was also repeatedly interested in this text…
Pre-paradise sorry now is a text with a mathematical and experimental structure, dealing with the unsound relation between Ian and Myra, two young lovers (he dominates, she is submitted), excited by the fascination of Nazism and by any form of violent subjection and intolerance, typical of middle classes’ ignorance and social frustration.
They lead a double life: they are unsuspected employees during the day while at night, locked in Ian’s apartment, carrying out sadomasochist rites and readings of De Sade, they start making fearful experiments on young victims kidnapped in the suburbs during the day. The victims are killed by unendurable tortures the two lovers commit when completely possessed by the fury of pure race.
The alarming thing emerging from this text consists in the fact that Ian and Myra really exist, they are two English serial killers arrested in 1966, The moors murderers, later ranked as pop icons of “murder couples”…
How many Ian and Myra exist today? Behind the well-kept little gardens and the flowers on the windowsills …they probably don’t kill with hatchets and knives, but with their looks and words instead, like in Katzelmacher, another play by Fassbinder on which we will work. One day, they will probably shoulder a kalashnikov and shoot randomly to their school mates... Hitler survived…
What a strange coincidence, the same sentence was pronounced in the play Twin Rooms and now it recurs. Pasolini’s consideration on the fascism in Petrolio and Salò comes back to our mind. We are probably staging the same performance but falling lower and lower every time.
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