Ravenna Teatro

 

Fellow listeners! Cyborgs of all races! Brother and sister mutants who live scared on this planet and all others! You who listen from a room with no way out, you who are mirrored in a white wall and risk throwing yourselves from the window for a love gone wrong! We announce a new invention on the way which will burst like a cyclone into the obsolete panorama of communications technology: a light and profound medium, unbridled and unbridling, planted like a tree and ubiquitous, capable of manifesting itself worldwide, even in the remotest village, even in the absence of electric light and telephones! This new invention is the theatre! Like all inventions its roots lie in the past: and that past may be useful in understanding the nature of this revolutionary novelty, as long as we leave aside its reliquary aspect, as long as we know how to distinguish dead matter – like the snake’s shed skin – from the living and throbbing body. And this comparison is just and striking if we reflect for only a moment on the serpentine nature of theatre, immortal as the god who protects it. Let us observe in detail the characteristics of this new invention. 1. As we were saying, this invention needs no electricity, so it skips over any problems linked to the energy crisis, to non-renewable energy sources like coal, uranium etc. It has a close, indispensable bond with the SUN: solar energy is necessary and sufficient to it, because this invention coincides with BODY-IN-LIFE! Body-in-life employs light as power and rhythm, as dazzle, as a multiplied visionary nature. Light allows body-in-life to penetrate the darkness of the guts and equips it to receive the interior glance, bearing out its remote spirituality. Moreover, body-in-life (and this feature has amazed observers and critics) is naturally gifted with a wireless MEMORY: you don’t have to haul any kind of cables around! You will agree, companions, that all this is the height of convenience and practicality! 2. The new invention is radically democratic. Yes, that’s right, we’re talking about DEMOCRACY here, talking literally. And to clear the field of any doubts at once, the word is used in the sense indicated in chapter XXVI of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in which “the great democratic God” is invoked: “Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selected champions from the kingly commons”. In a word, the God of the down-and-outs, not that God which others have snared in heaven, fleecing him with a rat-like smile, sneering at him, reducing him to a fashionable designer of terror! But then, dear companions, having clarified the divine etymon, what does this democracy consist of on a concrete level? We know that in Africa one family in a hundred has a telephone at home. As against about 95% in Europe. For the new invention, since it is democratic technology and coincides with body-in-life, we envisage a theoretical possibility of 100%, and we don’t mean one per family but one for each person! It can be everybody’s! And it can’t be patented! This doesn’t mean that the “result” of this technology cannot be sold or bought, but it is always done in the context of the abovementioned democracy and on an “ethical” market. 3. The new invention does not look at audience. It lives on a relationship of one-to-one glances, which is to say creator-enjoyer, actor-spectator. There lies its hidden SECRET: a pair as a small living community, an overturned and monstrous mirror, encounter of the different, infinitely distant and extraneous, gymnasium (certainly dangerous but we can’t close our eyes to the arrival of the storm, otherwise we wouldn’t open them again!) of experimentation with the mystery of the OTHER. This method should not be seen as being restricted to the context of the “double” but rather conceived as extendible and expandable to infinity. 4. With regard to point 3 it should be noted that there are no barriers of any kind between creator and enjoyer, no walls that isolate each in his own functions: indeed the new invention triggers a play of relationships in which the enjoyer is in turn author. As we know from 20th century physics, the observer as such modifies, with his “presence” alone, the observed object-subject. 5. This relationship triggers vision in all senses, it triggers EROS and IMAGINATION. The close contact of bodies arouses something turbulent, dangerous and seductive at the same time, something we might define as CELEBRATION if the word were not so polluted under present conditions, conditions in which we are subjected to the “obligatory” celebrations of modern communications! The being of the theatre is clarified here as OUTSIZE, “monstrous” inasmuch as it is marvellous, inasmuch as it fishes in the sublime mud of the unconscious. 6. It doesn’t need money! You understand, it doesn’t need money! Or maybe a little, yes… just enough for maintenance… because not even money should be demonised! But in a world where money, on the contrary, is idolatrised daily, the fact that we have an egalitarian technology which can function without it is, you will agree, quite something. It revives a never placated desire for freedom from restrictions. 7. The theatre, independently of the purposes of those who drive it, be they conscious authors or not, has an unquestionably THERAPEUTIC value. Take the word in the broadest possible sense so there can be no equivocation. Therapy for what? For the horrendous WHITENESS of the world, for the practice of blinding and cancelling of colours and sight. It puts us into touch with dreams, with the coloured stuff we’re made of, a subterranean universe which the power of this deformed age tends to make us belittle. It’s in the nature of an EX-VOTO, a burning desire for cure, pieces, the body in pieces, genitals, breasts, kidneys, knees, the body in pieces that howls its pain. And now the instructions for use. 1. Mix the right “knowledgeable” doses of the new technology and the “non” knowledgeable, actors and non-actors, technique and life. Generate the impurity necessary to correct functioning of the new invention, as in certain periods mentioned in the manuals, holy mediaeval representations, mass theatre in Russia in the 20’s and so on. Do not be afraid to exceed the doses – they’ll all gain by intermingling – and reject all pedantry and academicism. Let techne deal with the wealth of ignoring. 2. Work on TIME, challenging it as the greatest luxury permitted by this new invention in which new and ancient, primitive and avant-garde, come together as if by magic. It is certainly set in History, but with such open-mindedness that you have to take account of a “different temporality” which, in itself, persists and resists with regard to any evolutionary or “progressive” chronology. At each step it compares itself with the end of Time, with its wearing us out at every step, meaning with the mystery of DEATH, threshold of the not-yet, a parabola inscribed in the burning of every instant. 3. Turn the polis upside down, the “many” (who live in metropolises or villages): from the fundamental “double” (creator-enjoyer), from that CHALLENGE-EMBRACE, we need necessarily pass on to the third, which makes all eroticism necessary, from the third to the fourth and the fifth etcetera, in a spiritual-carnal ORGY of unimaginable wealth. Mutant brothers and sisters, there’s plenty to enjoy here! 4. If money isn’t needed and will not be made by this invention (be sure of it!) – see characteristic N° 6 – then what “unimaginable wealth” are we talking about here? Of the mobile engine of all voluptuousness, of desiring energy, the sense of the agonizing absence of what “we lack”, and in this “lack” within ourselves lies, since the times of Plato, the love urge towards the other. 5. It brings neither fame nor money, but what does that matter? It’s the challenge of an intrepid soul and that’s enough, so forward! In the HAPPINESS bank account it’s never in the red! And then, to conclude: the continents burn, each and every people is going to rack and ruin, increasingly scared of whoever’s knocking on the door! ANGUISH gets increasingly fat and in fattening devours shaky REASON. The smooth quiff of the world is all ruffled and there’s no power around – let them say what they like! – there’s no power that can or knows how to comb it… Notwithstanding all this and more, if the stars come out it means that somebody needs them, doesn’t it? Does it mean that somebody wants – or only desires? – that they should exist? Those little spits are pearls for our dreams. 

 

Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari, Il Teatro è l'invenzione del futuro in Patalogo N° 30, Ubulibri, Milan, 2008