OpenOption

Teatrino Clandestino

Teatro Comunale, Carpi

16/10/2009 ,  21:00  
17/10/2009 ,  22:00  

Ideated and composed by :
Fiorenza Menni

In collaboration with:
Roma Theatre – Macedonia, Jean Michel Bruyère, Luigi de Angelis, Matthias Kaufmann, Chiara Lagani, Andrea Mochi Sismondi, Loredana Vitale, Wilbi

With the care of:
Pietro Babina
Giovanni Brunetto
Elisa Marchese
Giorgia Mis
Viviana Vannello

With:
Faat Abedin
Hadži Asan
Matteo Garattoni
Eva Geatti
Amet Iasar
Alice Keller
Andrea Alessandro La Bozzetta
Monica Manca
Fiorenza Menni
Mauro Milone
Paola Stella Minni
Andrea Mochi Sismondi
Laura Pizzirani
Šaban Uzeir

With the support of:
Italian Embassy in Skopje
Ministery of Culture Republic of Macedonia
City of di Bologna - Culture Board
Bologna District – Culture Board
Emilia Romagna Region - Culture Board
Italian Ministery of Cultural Affairs – Performing Arts
ERT Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione

Thanks to:
Fiorentini + Baker, Filippo Monti, Roberto Rizzo, Clara Sancricca, Santasangre, Diego Segatto, Maria Paola Tadeo

Creative Residency:
Sì – Via San Vitale 67 - Bologna


World première

Running time 1h 30'

“In February 2007, during a stay in Skopje, we met the director of UNHCR (United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees) in the Balkans, who told us about the one and only Rom Municipality in the world, Šuto Orizari.
We decided to visit it. We hardly managed to convince the Macedonian taxi driver, who thought our visit to the Rom district wasn't suitable. Once we finally arrived, we walked for a few hours through the streets of the district, amidst sentences of which we couldn't understand the meaning but whose sense, between insult and derision, was clear.
On that occasion we saw Šuto Orizari only for a while, we only had the chance to look at the exterior of the houses, but in front of each and every housing proposal, at each and every glance, our excitement increased. We were looking at something we always keep on searching for: an umpteenth formal difference which, as such, conveys contents.”
Teatrino Clandestino asks then if some members of the company could be accepted into their community.


An experiment of experience
1st Stay in Šuto Orizari,
February March 2008
Actors as ethnographers; in the field they adapt, they feed and behave like the community's inhabitants, they talk to them trying to understand their specificities, their vision of the world.
The actors-ethnographers of post-ideological contemporaneity, taking the questions and hypotheses of Kaufmann's book "Illuminated Anarchy" as a starting point, put on the table of the dialogue with Šuto Orizari's community the fundamental themes of political philosophy:
freedom and equality - aspiration for a better and happier life - the possibility to pursue a personal and independent project of life - the right to move through the territory across the borders - the natural capabilities - the state of nature - the relation with constraint and even the legitimacy of the State.


Serendipity
2nd Stay in Šuto Orizari,
September October 2008
The actors-ethnographers go back to the investigation field of Šuto Orizari. This time for a more circumscribed exchange. It is a workshop of political philosophy with artists and intellectuals, shared with Theatre Roma.
The two groups confront each other, and together they identify the experimental object, some works of art inspired by Rom world, which can be taken as a starting point for the dialogue. The purpose is to understand if these works have represented or distorted this reality and why. The actors-ethnographers propose a second theme of discussion, this time a more provocative one: a list of prejudices and stereotypes on Rom world and people, and they ask the subjects of such prejudices and stereotypes to disprove or confirm them through a kind of apology.
On 2008 October 30 the actors-ethnographers, ready to come back, make a note in their diary: "We seem to have accomplished the result of some possible and powerful Western Studies, by reflex”.


Erdelesi, the end of winter
3rd Stay in Šuto Orizari,
May 2009

An increased number of actors-ethnographers go back to the investigation field , bringing with them the formal and conceptual structure they mean to use for the realization of the show “OpenOption”, conceived together with the Company's whole staff.
They will submit it to their cooperators and co-authors in Šuto Orizari for a last confrontation.

OpenOption is the spectacular re-edition of this meeting between human beings.
A choir of actors with sound-like abilities will meet in a theatre and, by asking questions, they will tell the audience about their experience in a very straight-forward way. Then, some other characters that have been dragged there by the theatre, will let the Rom people speak out and will give answers to these questions, acting as if they were some kind of wise men that got into confusion because of the multiple possibilities of expressions they were given.
A dialogue between two lovers will then explain which are the possible calculations to make free circulation in this world possible; and two performers, who will not be willing to re-construct a new imaginarium, in order to avoid misleading and incorrect collective visions of the world, will cause the distruction of all means and of all results of communication


As for the concept of "experimenting the experience" and of "western studies by reflex" we refer to Leonardo Piasere's “L’etnografo imperfetto” published by Laterza, Roma-Bari 2002 edition.

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