Open Eyes –

OPEN EYES – α/ω dream  

«We know that underneath the revealed image there is another one more faithful to reality, and underneath this other one another, and again under this last one, until the true image of that reality, absolute, mysterious that no one will ever see, or perhaps until the breakdown of any image, of any reality.»

Michelangelo Antonioni

Open-eyes – #dream α/ω is a research project that combines cinema and performing art: a participatory, site-human-specific cinepoietic action that involves the community of inhabitants of a specific nature or urban area, or of a broader territory, in the elaboration of a live streaming cinema performance, of long duration, and shares the meaning-making process with the public.

Open Eyes explores the possibility of turning sight into a poetic aptitude in order to gain lives for life.

The suspended time of surprise is what we seek, wonder at every step. Slowing everything down, dilating the pupils to the extreme consequences. To be dazzled by a breathtakingly beautiful landscape. Following familiar directions only to suddenly change gear. Finding oneself on the trail of a stranger. Crossing into another reality. Exercising the power of the gaze.

The creation process consists of an exploration and research residency; an artistic residency to elaborate and compose the collected material; an artistic residency to formalise and present the live performance; and the post-production of a short film resulting from the shooting.

The final performance consists of episodes, arranged over the course of a day, inserted into the usual flow of life in a given place. Everyday space becomes a natural film set, where the real and fictional dimensions are combined.

The single episodes are presented as short walking tours that the audience follows at a pace governed by the sequence shot live and streamed.

The filming takes place in a defined area, outdoors, and in some interiors where possible.

Walking audiences follow the development of the film live and at the same time enjoy its cinematic performance on the screens of their mobile devices, thanks to streaming.

The structure of the performance is specific and exclusive to each location involved in the project stage.

The relationship between the individual and the landscape, be it natural, urban or human, determines the visual theme of each #dream. The local stories and personal memories of the inhabitants feed the writing of a site-specific script, to be implemented with the community. Human and landscape architecture merge into a discontinuous composition, inspired by the formal innovation introduced into cinema by Michelangelo Antonioni, whose poetics inspired the project.

The narrative structure develops according to that “interior neo-realism” attributed by French critics to Antonioni’s early works. It is not a sequence of events, but a gaze that lingers on silences and absence, on the personal consequences and social effects of a weave of existences. The plot emerges as a symptom of evoked events, placed in an indefinite time, inspired by events that really happened in the community and linked to the historical memory of the place, but decontextualised and re-elaborated in a fictional subject. The particular and the universal combine in the alternation of depth of field and subjective, in a one-take sequence, with open eyes.

Lo spazio a dismisura d’uomo

Lo Spazio a Dismisura d’Uomo

by
Teatringestazione

directed by
Gesualdi | Trono

sound landscape
Maurizio Maria Galvani

With Giovanni Trono and all the attendees to the workshop and passers-by.

A performance workshop for young urban poets. The young participants are involved in an open-mic-lab. They start with a textual structure that sets up an ideal space of the composition, drawing on personal views of the places they inhabit and would like to transform; then projecting themselves into a performance in the urban space, also open to the participation of citizens and occasional passers-by. It is a performative device of poetic insubordination of space, to give voice to a boundless human landscape.


Na-Creature

Na-Creature

Long Play Track

by Teatringestazione

directed by Gesualdi | Trono

dramaturg Loretta Mesiti

live music by Alessandro Pezzella

video by Antonio Arte

director’s assistant Giovanni Passariello

with Giovanni Trono; one young student; three teachers


photo ©Fondazione Feltrinelli


co-production
Fondazione Feltrinelli and Teatringestazione

in the frame of the project Atlante degli immaginari

Our children participate in the struggles of adults as they are immersed in their own condition of marginalization. If possible, they participate and will participate, we hope, with greater awareness and clarity than the generation before them. 

La mensa dei bambini proletari – Ombre Rosse – Nuova Serie – n 6 – 1974

The poverty of schooling is a precise political strategy; it does not only concern the inadequacy of schools but the indifference of an entire country. Ugo Russo died of this lack of education at the age of 15. The audience is reflected in the gaze of the child Dionysus in front of the mirror, just before the Titans come to tear him apart.


NA Creature is dedicated to Ugo, to the boys of Naples and of all the cultural peripheries.
We join the voice of the Truth and Justice Committee for Ugo Russo and his family members, to claim the truth about the murder, and clarify, after a year and a half of waiting, if he was given the death penalty without trial.

by Teatringestazione


directed by Gesualdi | Trono


dramaturg Loretta Mesiti


live music by Alessandro Pezzella


video by Antonio Arte


director’s assistant Giovanni Passariello


with Giovanni Trono; one young student; three teachers

photo ©Fondazione GianGiacomo Feltrinelli

co-produzione
Fondazione Feltrinelli e Teatringestazione
nell’ambito del progetto Atlante degli immaginari

Atlante degli Immaginari is a project of cultural innovation among Italian territories promoted by Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, which welcomes the most innovative creative ferments. A journey born from the encounter between artistic sensibilities, local urgencies and a network of communities between the cities of Milan, Genoa, Naples, Taranto. A process of co-design – with the support of Fondazione Cariplo – which culminates in the staging of the national premiere at the festival Welcome to Socotra 2021.

Thanks to:

Truth and Justice Committee for Ugo Russo; Bianca Verde (DAMM e Lo sgarrupato); Giuseppe Carini (Mensa dei Bambini Proletari) con Roberto (Cyop&Kaf); Giovanni Laino (Fondatore di AQS – Associazione Quartieri Spagnoli), con Alessandro Pezzella (Educatore – AQS), insieme a Giovanni; Valeria Anatrella (Cooperativa il Grillo Parlante) con Gaetano (Educatore di prossimità – Centro Altra Casa), insieme ai ragazzi Marika, Luca, Anna; Nicola Laieta con Giuseppe di Somma (Maestri di Strada – Associazione Trerrote)

A waste land lies in the middle of the sea

A waste land lies in the middle of the sea

Outcome and workshop with the elderly guests of the San Giovanni Bosco sheltered house (MO), on the occasion of Trasparenze Festival 2019 Modena.


Direction Gesualdi|Trono
Photo Vicky Solli

The invitation of the “Teatro dei Venti” arrives on time, during a period of research focused on the act of disappearing, the disillusionment, the cancellation of every trace of humanity, up to its extinction.
These are the questions we want to share during this precious encounter with those whose body is marked, highlighted, by the passage to never.
We will not do so by questioning the intimate and subjective dimension, but the political one: the extinct political-body; the process of corruption of the dead body, as a metaphor for a defective civilisation.
It is in the transition to no longer than our presence becomes inevitably political when the body is no longer tied to an identity, but becomes an object, a waste, an rest to take charge. Someone will have to handle our corpse, whose weight will be directly proportional to the memory it carries with it. Is it not then, this becoming a “waste”, a subversive act?

The poems “Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot guide us in this consideration.
An “unreal city”, a “Paese Guasto” (as the poet Caproni calls it, following the suggestion of Dante), which Eliot sings through the prophetic voice of Tiresias:

You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

Stream~Meditations

Stream~Meditations

Initially conceived as a conference; Stream is an intermedial artistic format that stages streams of thinking; soliloquies condensed in an acoustic and hypnotic space. The diachronic composition is divided into thematic meditations, involving authoritative and sensitive voices, invited to a dialogue deferred in a digital dimension.

We needed to create a space where we would welcome the authenticity of thought as it manifests itself between the lips, while words are still being grown in the mouth before rounding off into sound.

Its composition method is designed to avoid the illustrative approach typical of the conference, which usually gathers the experts’ speeches in a pre-constituted form that excludes the audience from the space for reflection.

Chosen a topic; identified the speakers with expertise; we share materials and ideas in a unique and singular exchange, during a private conversation. Then we ask speakers to record a soliloquy, in a single breath, which remains uncut. The words are transferred to a musician and composer who puts them into dialogue with sound. Words and music are then placed in a digital space, defined by a single colour processed in imperceptible variations. The operation consists of thematic cycles collected on these web pages.

Curated by
TeatrInGestAzione

Direction
Gesualdi | Trono

Dramaturg
Loretta Mesiti

First Round ~ Abitare Futuro

May 2020, as part of “Maggio dei Monumenti”, an event organised by the Department of Culture of the City of Naples.

~ 3 meditations with Isabella Bordoni (poet, artist, and independent curator), Pietro Gaglianò (art critic and independent curator), Dario Gentili (philosopher and Moral Philosophy professor at the University of Rome “Università Roma Tre), Renato Grieco (composer and musician).

The discourse becomes sound-matter, flows from one room to another one, designing the poetic habitat, and welcoming the viewer. The voices that were questioned about the theme of Abitare Futuro (“to inhabit the future”, ndt) are gifted in the form of a soliloquy, opening in front of us, the arising of thought. Today’s state of exception imposes itself as a starting point and marks a breaking point, not only in the dimension of time but in the way of making any possible representation of tomorrow and the visible. The body, the language, the forest are the images that point at the threshold where the query, in its continuous transfiguration, turns into a clearing, a home, an invitation.

To orient yourself, you have to listen, put on the headphones, switch to full-screen mode, look, sink into the colour and trust the “internal artificer that shapes matter, forming it from inside like a seed or root shooting forth and unfolding the trunk, from within the trunk thrusting out the boughs, from inside the boughs the derived branches, and unfurling buds from within these. From therein it forms, fashions and weaves, as with nerves, the leaves, flowers and fruits.” (G.Bruno, De la causa, principio et uno).

Words and voices
Isabella Bordoni
Pietro Gaglianò
Dario Gentili

Sound Dramaturgy
Renato Grieco

*Isabella Bordoni track
Piano
Andrea Laudante / Jacopo D’Amico

Translation from
italian curated by
Giovanna Lo Conte

>>>english voice transcription

On the 3rd of April of this year, a few weeks ago, in the middle of a pandemic, inside a world that we all recognised as infected for the Covid-19: the virus whom we owe – in this tragedy, in truth – the merit of having taken the responsibility of having uncovered a systematic illness of a capitalist society that allows the speculative monopoly of the wealth, that allows the profit of the war industry, that allows the reckless exploitation of the Earth natural resources… here on the 3rd of April, in the middle of the pandemic . . .

– – read more – –

>>>english voice transcription

The first thing I do when I have to deal with a topic that might be familiar, or not, is to engage with its etymology. I have always been convinced that no word is neuter and that inside the depth of words is possible to find their true meaning. There, we can find stories of men and women, whole countries and cultures, layered on top of each other, that enable words to be spongy and porous, capable of holding and spreading meanings that can move away from those that, at first sight, might seem the obvious ones. I remember that . . .

– – read more – –

>>>english voice transcription

The condition that we are experiencing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, whether this is phase 1, phase 2 or which other stages will await us… here, there is no doubt that the conditions of inhabiting are turned upside down. Indeed, we have been forced into inhabiting our house. If by inhabiting we mean living at home, inhabiting our own home, there where we define our individuality, our personality, and represents us, in some ways . . .

– – read more – –

Footloose

Footloose (2017)

by TeatrInGestAzione

Pedagogic and scenic itineraries –
Gesualdi | Trono

The performance was created exclusively for Trasparenze Festival Modena and was the result of a workshop that involved some asylum-seekers of the project “Mare Nostrum”

Photos by Elisabetta Del Giudice

Video by Raffaele Manco – voice over by Vittorio Continelli from “Discorso sul Mito”.

The project was born during Trasparenze Festival 2017. The festival asked TeatrInGestAzione to prepare a performance with the Marewa group, composed by migrants, seeking asylum and refugees (belonging all to “Mare Nostrum”, a social project held by a local NGO).
Trasparenze Festival called us while we were following on social media, the developments and the fate of “Civil march for Aleppo”, a civil march for peace, from Berlin to Aleppo, proceeding on the so-called “refugee route”, but to the opposite direction. An independent initiative started by people who do not represent any organisation or political party, but citizens who together decided to launch an appeal to action, and to act rather than to wait.
A clear image then appeared while we were preparing to meet the Marewa group: a moving wall, embedded, grafted in the feet, dragged by bodies that walking can mark new boundaries. A march to cancel the sense of separation, of negation, of limitation that a wall figures.
In people’s minds, a wall is rooted to the ground, stationary, impossible, to be torn down, bypassed, or overcome, extended in length and height, beyond, imposing. Its image immediately gives us the perception of a certain weight, the same of a solid matter, as certain dull prejudges built on the sneaky fears.
Therefore, the work aims to transform the wall into the living and changeable material, in a dancing body. The bodies of the exiles dress bricks, which merge with the memory of their migration journey. They cross the city in a silent parade, accompanied by the tinkle of dragged blocks, which reminds of horses and chains, evoking that New World that enslaved Africans. The faces are covered with gaudy butterflies, softly placed between the sweat, the folds of the skin and the grimaces of heaviness. The landfall is in the square, under the midday sun, where the bodies are preparing for the last trip, dancing on the rubble.
Footloose is a ritual act, a cathartic journey. The spectators who follow the march contribute to the making of the image of a crowd that cuts through the city. After having walked, the spectator experiences the body that wants to be the “Other” that dances. And this “Other” is the foreigner of whom we are afraid.

Footloose is a moving-image word. A triggering firelighter. It resounds through the main streets of the city, makes its way through the Sunday’s clothes, slips down and explodes. It is a dramatic action that invites us to walk, to cross over, to risk because nowhere we are safe because we are the wandering bomb, the wall that collapses, the escape, the storm in the open sea, the foreign tongue, the earth, the earth! Land of passage, because there is no more home to return to, but a new humanity shouting of “let’s dance!”.
The title is borrowed from the musical film “Footloose” which tells the attempt of integration of a young boy from Chicago, who moved to a small town. At Beaumont, Ren is seen as a threat, but he will kick off a revolution.
This “80s American flick” animated our adolescence as small-town young people. He left us the desire for rebirth and a soundtrack that still has the power to unleash a dancing revolution. Despite its youthful plot, strong images emerge as bonfires of banished books, citizens’ committees who improvise themselves as Avengers, advocating “the public health”.
The film takes us back to the current condition that migrants live in our cities. The film takes us back to the present situation that migrants live in our cities. The blames that “small bourgeoises” of Beaumont address to Ben, the young foreigner – a dangerous corrupter of manners, a potential criminal – are not so far from the lapidary sentences that feed our “Pogrom 3.0”. The refugees are perceived as invaders, usurpers, barbarians, dangerous, violent, wild animals, indomitable, voted who knows to what devil.
Blinded by fear, nourished by the media poison, the stranger is whom we chose as our enemy, the cause of all evil and we are voted to his suppression.
With our Footloose, we want to release energy capable of reversing this thought; power that generates an unknown irresistible force, able to join the bodies, in a new encounter, devoted to desire and no longer to the fear. On the eve of the meeting with the Marewa group, the Footloose started to champ at the bit.

Bestiale Copernicana


Bestiale Copernicana is a work disposed in different spaces and time: in theatre, domestic and outdoor spaces. Each one of these part offers an autonomous interpretation, and each part can be independent from the others.
We assume that the artistic action needed nowadays is not the gesture closing its own fate in the defined formal contour of a work, but the searching working act, in creation, in process, in dialogue, that frees from the meaning and provokes the audience to search and give a new sense. Calling the parameters of theatre space – time into question, we invocate a Copernican overturn of our way of inhabiting the common space – time. From the paradigm of representation in which the ACTION OF WHO IS REPRESENTING allows and approves my ABSENCE (“I watch you, letting you act in my own place”), to the paradigm of the shared presence, in which everyone is invited to BUILD his own stay, making his presence an ACT OF CREATION.
The work meditates on the “genetic” moment of the foundation, investigating the processes that in several fields of knowledge (science, philosophy, spirituality) originated the overturns, the subversions of our perceptions, causing the Copernican beastly visions that freed a new possibility to know ourselves as human beings and plan our acts.
#2.Bestiale Copernicana is the second movement of avVento, a multi-year project conceived as an “ideal space of foundation” gathering together several artists with the common assignment to contribute to the writing of a post-modern myth of foundation.

BESTIALE COPERNICANA

by TeatrInGestAzione
scenic itineraries – Gesualdi / Trono dramaturgic itineraries – Loretta Mesiti photographic itineraries – Valentina Quintano with Giovanni Trono, Alessia Mete
PRODUCTION 2014 TeatrInGestAzione
with the support of
PAN Palazzo delle Arti di Napoli (Napoli)
Ella Fiskum Danz R.E.D. (Norway) Trasparenze > residenze – Atelier della Scena Contemporanea (Modena)


Absolute Beginners

ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS

To cross boundaries. While crossing, to give them a new outline.

The work is rooted in the specific theme of boundaries. The political, physical, linguistic boundaries of identities that tend to their dissolution, to heal what is stranger and familiar in a new sign, bringing the sense of origin and the horizon that lies in front of the path of a new community that is to be founded.
Its scenic structure is given by the dismemberment of the elements composing a single landscape, in which the actors open unexpected poetical landscapes (built with essential materials), as very workers of the “vision”. The narrative synthe- sis is committed to the audience.
Fragments of bodies emerge from the amniotic fluidity of darkness that swallows up the boundaries. Their integrity was stolen but they are still able to act, they are still concentrated on building and searching a possibility to read their own condition and place their own existence.
#1.Absolute Beginners is the first movement of avVento, a multi-year project conceived as an “ideal space of foundation” gathering together several artists with the common assign- ment to contribute to the writing of a post-modern myth of foundation.

by TeatrInGestAzione
scenic itineraries – Gesualdi / Trono
dramaturgic itineraries – Loretta Mesiti
PRODUCTION 2012 TeatrInGestAzione
with the support of
MOVIN’UP a cura di Mibac e GAI
Insitut für Theater, Film und Medienwissenschaf der Goethe Universität; HessischTheaterakademie; Tanz der Künste; Frankfurt LAB (Frankfurt am Main)

Canto Trasfigurato

 

 

 

 

Canto Trasfigurato

Un inno alla sopravvivenza della propria umanità, in un mare pieno di pescecani, per ritrovare in sé ciò che c’è di divino e di eterno.
Ovvero di Moby Dick canto, e d’altri mostri che ho amato.

*nota per il pubblico

Si passeggia per interminabili minuti col corpo rivoltato e l’anima all’aperto nei cortili del Manicomio Criminale di Aversa. In questi cortili ho incrociato gli occhi del mio mostro, e la sua tenerezza mi ha fatto schiavo. Seiano, è uno dei “mostri” che ho amato, nelle ore dell’attività teatrale, in manicomio, nella danza di passi lenti, nei canti squarciati al sapore di tabacco, amato in viaggio con Caino, in discesa libera all’inferno. E all’inferno è finito Seiano, e anch’io. Siamo saliti in scena insieme, da pari a pari il volo. “Meraviglioso” abbiamo gridato al nostro pubblico, e poi più nulla. Dopo pochi giorni massacrato a morte da “compagni” di cella lasciati agire indisturbati. Ma a lui la scena lo aveva risvegliato e ho deciso di regalargli il mio studio sul Moby Dick, il mio corpo e la mia demenza. Insieme dannati nel Paradiso.