www.teatrinoclandestino.org

TEMPESTA (MELOLOGO)

… Shakespeare’s The Tempest takes its name from an antecedent, a scene that takes place before Act One which apparently, in quantitative terms, is microscopic if compared to the overall development of the play – it is nonetheless the play’s generating scene. It is an overwhelming that throws everyone into a state of separation from the world, hurling the individuals’ existence into a space that is similar to the blank page of a book.
This state of annulment of the quotidian forcefully brings to the fore each individuals’ existence and forces us to reflect on our relationship with the things and people who live alongside us, destroys (for interminable moments) the securities on which we solidly base ourselves – but the aim is not to destroy, but to revive.
Thus we find tempests in many of the moments of our lives – for example when we feel pain for a love that is wavering, the death or birth of someone or something, the inexorable making of a choice, contesting what is beautiful or the violence of what is ugly.
Being in a tempest is like being inebriated, like being madly in love, like crying desperately, like no longer wanting, like wanting everything, like barely whispering, like singing as loudly as possible, like running, as if everything might be coming to an end, as if anything might be possible, like being on the verge of suicide, like not being able to stand anything at all – it is the vortex that sucks you into its centre it is the womb that expels you it is feeling infinitely well and at the same time infinitely bad…

we accidentally found ourselves face to face with the desire to tell a story but at the same time how to tell a story (I think this is inevitable), and this led us to face our work in a way that is very different from usual because in the past we have always given ourselves over to poetry, or rather to the poetic, which we know is a-temporal, the entire weight of guiding, I mean guiding those who are watching and not only across the entire development of the scenes, here, however, as was already said in reference to The Magic Idealist, we are attempting an assault on narration intended in its most direct sense, but not its modes.
Telling a story is very difficult, complicated, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is only a part of the story that we have on stage we have added another one and another again in order to create a stratification of narrations that if on the one had seem to complicate on the other enrich and dilate the space in which the viewer’s expectations can wander free without having to worry about the “objective” story.
Another important direction in this work is the relationship not so much with music as with the musical, which we have always held dear; not by chance, the title also contains the word “melologue” and it is true for me, author and director, that the only dramaturgy that I can conceive of is sound, sound not only in all its acoustic manifestations but above all in its rhythmic value: however the reference to the “melologue” in this work is direct, in fact the complete development of the performance sees, or rather hears, for its entire length, music that has been composed for enacted texts: original music specially composed for the play for a more or less original text without overlooking the narrative values of the “melologue”.
No less important is the state of work on pronunciation, we decided to use a 19th century translation precisely because of the difficulties involved in its enunciation. Once again we wanted to come to grips with the word but this time almost with each individual word those small, incommensurable obstacles beyond which discourse does not always exist…

then there is also the inevitable problem of how it might be possible, plausible, to transfer a text onto the stage when it is four hundred years old, what relationships might there be between us and the world and fantasy contained in this text? And if it is possible to intuit some of the connections, who might be able to translate these into theatrical, that is “representable”, terms? The impression you have at first, that is when you start to work, is that it is impossible to “represent”, to pronounce… but then a few ciphers begin to emerge and something comes to the surface, most certainly, and we felt this from the very first… it is not “actualisation” that connects our life to the stage “representation”, we think of the now, once again, that the bridge can be found in the words, the poetry and the diction…
As the theatrical work, both on a textual and representational level, made transformations (some even quite deep) in terms of the original intentions of The Tempest it goes without saying that the characters are no longer directly identifiable with their original forms in their typical guises, however their essential presence is still there as the basic value, and is conserved both at a textual and con-textual level, that is they are evoked when they are not invoked within the enunciatory act but not within the creation of the normal binary formula of character/actor.
We have always used the theatrical text as an instrument, or rather as a tool, the text, the representation of the text is never the final goal of our work; consequently, the text is not a monolith around which the other parts of the representation gravitate but is one of the components of the overall theatre, where dramaturgy is the language with and through which the representation is made to speak, if something in the staging doesn’t work it is either changed or eliminated, just as I do with the music and the actors, I don’t see why it should be any different in terms of the text, and then I also think that Shakespeare’s texts ought to be used, even though they aren’t, as canvases and so I once again say that yes, they are tools, and what’s more very useful tools if they are well used…

… as we have to speak specifically about the way in which the Shakespearean text has been used in reference to our belonging to the 20th century and therefore most clearly in reference to current affairs, we can say that through our performance we want to bring to the fore the importance of the performance of a work, taking this term and its value from musical culture.
We are sure that performance is the generating force of actualisation: in this vision, the work is freed from re-writing or temporal transposition as the means used to bring the work into the field of a discourse on modernity.
What Shakespeare narrates cannot be easily superimposed onto our daily lives; it is the form of our theatre, our performance inasmuch as we are living now, our re-citation that obviously bring Shakespeare into a dialogue with the present.
This clarity of intent has been attained thanks to an analysis of and a “being embarrassed” by questions about what it means to give oneself over to a text that is more than four hundred years old, of which there have been many versions, innumerable translations and performances. What emerged were reflections on keeping to the path of the culture to which we mainly refer and the importance of dramatising a narration which is generally known as establishing and desiring a cathartic communality and hence a hovering above the text, and therefore an attempt to execute and put into practice theatrical grammars…

	TEMPESTA (MELOLOGO) … Shakespeare’s The Tempest takes its name from an antecedent, a scene that takes place before Act One which apparently, in quantitative terms, is microscopic if compared to the overall development of the play – it is nonetheless the play’s generating scene. It is an overwhelming that throws everyone into a state of separation from the world, hurling the individuals’ existence into a space that is similar to the blank page of a book. This state of annulment of the quotidian forcefully brings to the fore each individuals’ existence and forces us to reflect on our relationship with the things and people who live alongside us, destroys (for interminable moments) the securities on which we solidly base ourselves – but the aim is not to destroy, but to revive. Thus we find tempests in many of the moments of our lives – for example when we feel pain for a love that is wavering, the death or birth of someone or something, the inexorable making of a choice, contesting what is beautiful or the violence of what is ugly. Being in a tempest is like being inebriated, like being madly in love, like crying desperately, like no longer wanting, like wanting everything, like barely whispering, like singing as loudly as possible, like running, as if everything might be coming to an end, as if anything might be possible, like being on the verge of suicide, like not being able to stand anything at all – it is the vortex that sucks you into its centre it is the womb that expels you it is feeling infinitely well and at the same time infinitely bad… we accidentally found ourselves face to face with the desire to tell a story but at the same time how to tell a story (I think this is inevitable), and this led us to face our work in a way that is very different from usual because in the past we have always given ourselves over to poetry, or rather to the poetic, which we know is a-temporal, the entire weight of guiding, I mean guiding those who are watching and not only across the entire development of the scenes, here, however, as was already said in reference to The Magic Idealist, we are attempting an assault on narration intended in its most direct sense, but not its modes. Telling a story is very difficult, complicated, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is only a part of the story that we have on stage we have added another one and another again in order to create a stratification of narrations that if on the one had seem to complicate on the other enrich and dilate the space in which the viewer’s expectations can wander free without having to worry about the “objective” story. Another important direction in this work is the relationship not so much with music as with the musical, which we have always held dear; not by chance, the title also contains the word “melologue” and it is true for me, author and director, that the only dramaturgy that I can conceive of is sound, sound not only in all its acoustic manifestations but above all in its rhythmic value: however the reference to the “melologue” in this work is direct, in fact the complete development of the performance sees, or rather hears, for its entire length, music that has been composed for enacted texts: original music specially composed for the play for a more or less original text without overlooking the narrative values of the “melologue”. No less important is the state of work on pronunciation, we decided to use a 19th century translation precisely because of the difficulties involved in its enunciation. Once again we wanted to come to grips with the word but this time almost with each individual word those small, incommensurable obstacles beyond which discourse does not always exist… then there is also the inevitable problem of how it might be possible, plausible, to transfer a text onto the stage when it is four hundred years old, what relationships might there be between us and the world and fantasy contained in this text? And if it is possible to intuit some of the connections, who might be able to translate these into theatrical, that is “representable”, terms? The impression you have at first, that is when you start to work, is that it is impossible to “represent”, to pronounce… but then a few ciphers begin to emerge and something comes to the surface, most certainly, and we felt this from the very first… it is not “actualisation” that connects our life to the stage “representation”, we think of the now, once again, that the bridge can be found in the words, the poetry and the diction… As the theatrical work, both on a textual and representational level, made transformations (some even quite deep) in terms of the original intentions of The Tempest it goes without saying that the characters are no longer directly identifiable with their original forms in their typical guises, however their essential presence is still there as the basic value, and is conserved both at a textual and con-textual level, that is they are evoked when they are not invoked within the enunciatory act but not within the creation of the normal binary formula of character/actor. We have always used the theatrical text as an instrument, or rather as a tool, the text, the representation of the text is never the final goal of our work; consequently, the text is not a monolith around which the other parts of the representation gravitate but is one of the components of the overall theatre, where dramaturgy is the language with and through which the representation is made to speak, if something in the staging doesn’t work it is either changed or eliminated, just as I do with the music and the actors, I don’t see why it should be any different in terms of the text, and then I also think that Shakespeare’s texts ought to be used, even though they aren’t, as canvases and so I once again say that yes, they are tools, and what’s more very useful tools if they are well used… … as we have to speak specifically about the way in which the Shakespearean text has been used in reference to our belonging to the 20th century and therefore most clearly in reference to current affairs, we can say that through our performance we want to bring to the fore the importance of the performance of a work, taking this term and its value from musical culture. We are sure that performance is the generating force of actualisation: in this vision, the work is freed from re-writing or temporal transposition as the means used to bring the work into the field of a discourse on modernity. What Shakespeare narrates cannot be easily superimposed onto our daily lives; it is the form of our theatre, our performance inasmuch as we are living now, our re-citation that obviously bring Shakespeare into a dialogue with the present. This clarity of intent has been attained thanks to an analysis of and a “being embarrassed” by questions about what it means to give oneself over to a text that is more than four hundred years old, of which there have been many versions, innumerable translations and performances. What emerged were reflections on keeping to the path of the culture to which we mainly refer and the importance of dramatising a narration which is generally known as establishing and desiring a cathartic communality and hence a hovering above the text, and therefore an attempt to execute and put into practice theatrical grammars…