X(ics) Racconti crudeli della giovinezza>> Halle Neustadt [X.03 terzo movimento]
17/10/2008
, 
19:00
18/10/2008
, 22:00
devised and directed by Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò
with Lidia Aluigi, Silvia Calderoni, Sergio Policicchio, Mario Ponce-Enrile, Ines Quosdorf
in video Silvia Calderoni, Sergio Policicchio, Denis Kuhnert, Karl Haußmann, Sabine Bock, Toni Bernhardt, Susanne Sudol, Adreas Berger and the bands Foulse Jockers (I), Tomorrow Never Come (F), Types of Erin (D), Bring me to my 2nd burial (D)
video production Motus & Francesco Borghesi (p-bart.com)
shooting Francesco Borghesi, Daniela Nicolò
video compositing Francesco Borghesi
text compositing Daniela Nicolò
audio compositing Enrico Casagrande
sound design Roberto Pozzi
technical direction Giorgio Ritucci
lights Daniela Nicolò
live music Ines Quosdorf , Sergio Policicchio, Mario Ponce-Enrile
stage design Giancarlo Bianchini Arto-Zat, Erich Turroni - Laboratorio dell’imperfetto
architectural consultancy Fabio Ferrini
stage photography Valentina Bianchi, End&Dna
relations Sandra Angelini
with the collaboration of Federica Savini
organisation and logistics Elisa Bartolucci, Valentina Zangari
administration Cronopios
Produced by Motus with: The Venice Dance Biennale, Lux-Scène National de Valence (F), Theater der Welt 2008 in Halle, Istituzione Musica Teatro Eventi, Municipality of Rimini “Progetto Reti”.
In collaboration with: Comédie de Valence (F), L’Arboreto di Mondaino, Teatro Petrella di Longiano, Teatro della Regina di Cattolica, Mittelfest ’08 – Cividale del Friuli.
With the support of: Rimini Provincial Administration, Emilia Romagna Regional Administration, POGAS (Youth and Sports Activities Policies), Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities
The residency and show at the Theater der Welt were made possible by the support of the ETI – Italian Theatre Association.
Motus thanks:
Anne Sudmeyer, David Mass, Monica Marotta, Anna Kasten, Claudia Bock, Sabine Bock, Toni Bernhardt, Susan Sudol, Andreas Berger, Hannes Wilhe, Alex Kraft, Florian Von Borrell Du Vernay, Sebastian Utzig, Stephan Reußner, Stephan Rudolph, Cornelia Ricther, Matthias Heckl and Daniel Hermann.
And all the staff of the Festival Theater der Welt 2008 who supported and helped us with dedication and kindness.
length 1h 10'
A bus-shuttle is available to reach Ponte Alto. Departure from Teatro delle Passioni 30’ before the beginning of the show.
Attempting to portray youth touches off a short circuit with our own experience of youth, with the memories and turmoil of a state that no longer exists, is past and distant, has cruelly gone by. Contact with adolescent recklessness brought about a remixing of emotions that zeroed and fragmented all the convictions about theatre we had accumulated to date: the results were a helter-skelter of thoughts, confetti of certainties, polyester crumbs of meaning…
You set out with ideas, concepts, sociological references, then once you’re inside certain atmospheres – which we infiltrated by experimenting with a non-invasive and almost invisible documentary technique – you find yourself making a regressive leap backwards. It isn’t nostalgia: you have to immerse yourself in order to bring other worlds alive on the stage. How to recreate certain states of suspension in the afternoon solitude of the city? Wandering, getting anxious or sitting in vacuous expectation on a bench, ceaselessly wishing that something new and marvellous will show up.... “I’m waiting, I’m afraid I’ve got nothing better to do…” says Malcolm at the beginning of James Purdy’s book (from which we wanted to make an impossible film). The ghost of Malcolm remains in the air, hovers over the impulsive shooting we’ve done on the outskirts of three different cities… We moved around swiftly with the video-cameras always running, eternally pursued by the curiosity of kids who’d at last found “something to do”: follow “the Italians”, who were not making a TV programme – as everyone asked – but were collecting material for a future film, now brought together in this sort of hybrid show that assembles the germs of a strident concert and a dirty, asynchronous dance, triggered by the relationship with the asphalt of the streets. These experiments then led us on to those secluded places, terrain-vagues, where you slip away for your first kisses, your first transgressions, first attempts at being there… at being where?
“…a world I really didn’t ask to come and live in!”
The problem isn’t the emptiness the young feel inside but the desert, created by adults, in which they are obliged to live from birth onwards (…) wrote Paul Goodman as early as the 60’s… and this still emerges somewhat from the conversations with kids…
“… How can I have faith in the law when all the institutions created by adults, the church, politics, the police, the universities… are corrupt… how can I dress soberly when I see an increasing number of adults acting like kids or achieving success by appearing younger… How can I have a plan when I’m living in a system that’s up to its ears in string-pulling… And why are mobile phones prohibited in schools but allowed in parliament? And why believe in the supremacy of truth when we get lies from the prime minister, MPs, journalists and even my own mother when she says she’s happy… and how can you appreciate the beauty of this world when you’re continually seeing wars and environmental destruction?
No…the problem isn’t our emptiness inside but the desert created by grown-ups…”
The desert of adults is the human desert described by Pasolini, reflected in today’s new urban deserts, spaces of wildcat destruction and reconstruction, no-man’s-lands where glittering shopping malls spring up unpredictably, where people go to kill time rather than to buy, places where kids gather and meet, to show up and show off, to try being there, once again like merchandise amid merchandise.
- What do you see? A limitless kingdom without a centre: the soft version of a police state.
- And who’s the leader?
- He hasn’t arrived yet. But he’ll turn up. He’ll come out of some shopping mall. Messiahs always come from the desert.
(From a film dialogue on the first movement of the Ics project, taken from J.G. Ballard’s “Kingdom Come” which today, with Berlusconi’s comeback in Italy, takes on a sinister echo…)
The kids we met weren’t yobs or empty packages of the kind painted by a certain simplistic kind of TV propaganda… there were surprises of humanity and kindness, different, really different inside. It’s to them that we dedicate this work which took shape on the outskirts, in the artificial places of consumerism.
The first movement began in shopping malls, the new cathedrals of the Italian provinces, where Silvia, distributing leaflets with the words I’m looking for myself, chanced to meet Sergio from Buenos Aires and… his “expression of expectation was so intense” that we brought him on stage with his bass, though he’d never done or seen theatre. In Valence we met Mario, who lives in Paris. Filipino by origin, he has recently become an Italian citizen… another person far from the theatre but deeply into music and with a track record of several years of street dance: he stepped with absolute spontaneity into this show-experiment whose poetic keystones are openness to risk and the fragility of showing yourself. Then in June ’08 we had another residency in Halle Neustadt, the satellite district, the new ideal city, created for the workers of a real utopian socialism which crumbled and was sold piece by piece, like the bits of wall you can still buy at the airport. Here, in a dilapidated rehearsal room, we met Ines, a singer and music student. After 10 days of rehearsals she was facing a packed and enthusiastic house at the Theater der Welt… For the rest our own theatre, mongrel and in perennial revolt against the “father-masters”, came into being in rehearsal rooms in the middle of nowhere, in Romagna, far from city centres and big theatres, independent and right from the start seen as a collective band rather than a hierarchical theatre company.
The signs of the end and of flight are impressed on the walls of this city in former East Germany: the end of a dream-regime, of “another possible world”, standing against the standardising advent of the only winning-losing model, American monoculture which, like all monocultures, exhausts and dries up even the best soils…
Now in the centre of Halle Neustadt there’s also a multiplex and lots of shopping centres that don’t do so well because the population has been almost halved. Most of the windows are empty and the few remaining young people roam around in gangs, like plunderers after who knows what disaster. Do they know, are they aware of what’s happened? Do they know why their grandparents speak Russian?… There it is, this sense of ending, of post- and of tenacious resistance amid chaos that urges us on and is the soul of the last movement of Ics, short circuit of old and new, interior and exterior, empty and full, present and memory… youth and age.
