VIE Scena Contemporanea Festival - L'uomo della sabbia - Capriccio alla maniera di Hoffmann

L'uomo della sabbia

Capriccio alla maniera di Hoffmann

Menoventi

15/10/2011 , 21:00
16/10/2011 , 16:30

Ideared by Consuelo Battiston, Gianni Farina e Alessandro Miele
Direction Gianni Farina
Music Stefano De Ponti
Lights and technique director Robert John Resteghini
With Tamara Balducci, Consuelo Battiston, Tolja Djokovic, Francesco Ferri,
Alessandro Miele, Mauro Milone

Assistant director Chiara Fallavollita
Stagehand Andrea Bulgarelli
Company technician Sergio Taddei
Stage built in the laboratory of Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
Costumes Elisa Alberghi
Photography Arianna Lodeserto
Graphic ideation Marco Smacchia

Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione, Festival delle Colline - Torino, Programma Cultura dell’Unione Europea nell’ambito del Progetto Prospero

Thank to Marco Cavalcoli e Chiara Lagani, Teatro Fondamenta Nuove, perAspera/Drammaturgie Possibili - Festival di Arti Contemporanee, Valtorto, Santarcangelo dei Teatri, all workshops' participants from Ubiq project.

Running time 1h 30'

World Première

Menoventi are young protagonists of the contemporary Italian scene, authors of InvisibilMente and In Festa. The already debut in Modena in the last season at Teatro delle Passioni, present at VIE as a world première L’uomo della sabbia. The production is part of the five-year project Prospero (2008-2012), a co-operation work of the European Union of which Emilia Romagna Teatro Foundation is Italian partner. The drama texture of L'uomo della sabbia develops around some central ideas. The drama is freely adapted from the short-story “The sand-man” by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann using as inspiration all his work says well. Hoffmann is a visionary writer, who investigates topics such as the loss of the sense of reality and the confusion that comes from it.
In the novel we find suspended and hypnotic atmospheres, sudden changes of perspective that modify our point of view on reality, opening new horizons in cognitive abilities and disclosing the society that imprisons the brave characters, who are fighting against ordinariness.
Together with these suggestions from Hoffmann, Menoventi take some cues even from other authors: Adolfo Bioy Casares, Philip K. Dick and David Lynch.

In L’uomo della sabbia characters are dip into boredom and in greyness of ordinariness. The gap between wish and action is extremely wide.

The challenge is that of reducing the gap, creating a system in which everything happens at the same time, as an antidote against boredom. The aim is that of getting to a new situation fighting against dichotomies like positive-negative, before-after, high-low, logic-illogic. To imagine in this way a change of perspective following the linearity of events that produces paradoxes. These paradoxes are shown in the dramaturgical choice of dividing the action in Zones that host different levels of representation, which have the peculiarity of sudden shifts through the overlapping of different situations which are breaking down the narrative coherence in a way that the audience is brought to think about what happened until that moment and putting everything under investigation to understand if it has been real or not.

http://www.menoventi.com

Menoventi

- 20 is a temperature
- 19 Watching upside down the thermometer of a warm salon, you can realise that it's your own home's temperature, only the point of view changes.
- 18 Actual reality is reality upside down actually.
- 17 It's not time for us to define our poetic, yet.
- 16 Recurrent themes follow us; it's up to them, not us.
- 15 There's a working approach, a stochastic method. Following the ways of randomness, we torture ideas and give up finding a shape.
- 14 Every new project startles us, and for this reason we damn it for months.
- 13 Randomness torments us, and for this reason we publicly accuse it.
- 12 The Public exists.
- 11 The show wants to happen
- 10 Here and now, Time contorts itself inside the present
- 9 The Public exists.
- 8 If we say what we say, something is going to be.
- 7 Predictable becomes inconceivable.
- 6 Does the Public exist?
- 5 The actor can see it for sure, but this doesn't mean anything
- 4 The Public can see the actor for sure, but this is another story.
- 3 Sometimes the little figures we place on stage are laughable.
- 2 Sometimes everything is so naive.
- 1 Sometimes we get warmer, just a little.
0 It's still very cold

Consuelo Battiston, Gianni Farina and Alessandro Miele come from different regions of Italy, where they follow different paths on their own. United from a common way to feel and think the Theatre, they found Menoventi's theatre company in 2005.

The show

Programme