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ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS a creation by TeatrInGestAzione

Nowadays we tend to consider ourselves as successors and posthumous. Is it still possible to live and think our existence as a beginning? Our actions as founding? Our making as inscribed in a shared horizon?

Author TeatrInGestAzione; Directors Gesualdi | Trono; Dramaturg Loretta Mesiti;

ita > eng Translator Marzia Macedonio

The work was created with the support of MOVIN’UP Prize by Mibact and GAI; Institut für Theater, Film und Medienwissenschaf der Goethe Universität; Hessisch Theaterakademie; Tanz der Künste; Frankfurt LAB (Frankfurt am Main)

Theathres and festivals: 2019, ConTempo Festival - Kaunas (Lituania); 2016, CRT Triennale - Milano (Italy); 2016, Play K(ey), Zona K - Milano (Italy); 2015, DOIT Festival Drammaturgie Oltre il Teatro, Teatro Due - Roma (Italy); 2014, Trasparenze Festival, Teatro dei Venti - Modena (Italy); 2013, Stagione Sperimentale Europea, Teatro della Contraddizione - Milano (Italy); 2013, Finestre sul giovane teatro, Teatro Ridotto - Bologna (Italy); 2012, Museo del Sottosuolo - Napoli (Italy); 2011, Frankfurt Lab Frankfurt am Main (Germany).

REVIEWS

"At last, in Italy there is someone who starts a new construction, in spite all the perpetually dissatisfied, satisfied cynics and birds of ill omen. Thanks to an oriental and pre-Socratic sensibility (that excludes the perfect logic of rationality), TeatrInGestAzione gives birth to a mythopoeic performance, that is a work not telling a story but rather going back to its own founding action. The title itself Absolute Beginners suggests a work that begins from the principles, the archetypes, that early matrix that we chase during every creation process. With no expedients and by mixing different artistic languages in a laudable balance, TeatrInGestAzione uses visual art, literature and material sounds, offering a total performance that leads us in the waiting room for the future."

Giulio Sonno [Paper Street]

La creazione collettiva è frutto di un gruppo di lavoro, TeatrInGestAzione, di base a Napoli, un organismo creativo in cui l’intersoggettività è la base dell’evoluzione poetica, le cui tensioni si risolvono in atti creativi dal forte impatto visivo ma anche su una attenta gestione dello spazio e della presenza dell’attore, la cui cifra performativa appare manifestarsi in modo evidente. Si inseriscono in un filone che dopo i primi importanti approdi di Pathosformel, Santasangre o Muta Imago da anni non trovava riflessioni compiute sufficientemente complete dal punto di vista estetico e concettuale.

Renzo Francabandera [PAC - Pane Acqua e Culture]

Una ricerca dell'essenza di sé stessi e della/e chiave/i di interpretazione della realtà contingente esterna, un po' come aprire la porta e varcare la soglia della quarta dimensione infilando nella toppa della serratura un nastro di Möbius. Ci si sente (e si diviene) “esuli”, “stranieri in terra straniera” (avrebbe detto Robert A. Heinlein), lì dove la terra straniera è la propria casa, il proprio ambiente, la propria terra natia... e così si diviene bisognosi di un cambiamento radicale, dovuto allo sguardo critico sviluppato osservando “il resto” dal nuovo punto di vista nel quale ci si è ritrovati.

Fabio Montemurro [La Platea]

Technical details

  • lenght: about 50 min
  • stage: three white sheets 6x3 mt; X-ray floor; we set up on the floor 50 x-rays, on which we balance small bricks of wood
  • light: provided by the company (different size and power pocket-size lights and lasers, controlled by the actors on the stage). PLEASE NOTE that the show needs a totally dark venue
  • sound: PA system; 1 microphones

The experience offered by the work is strongly visual as dramaturgy is built through images. The textual part of the show is short. The show can be in English or Italian.

Nowadays we tend to consider ourselves as successors and posthumous. Is it still possible to live and think our existence as a beginning? Our actions as founding? Our making as inscribed in a shared horizon?

Wriggling out of the nest’s warmth. Leaving behind comfort, abundance and the tranquil safety of an inherited organic and organized path. Foundation occurs on the way of a path that does not hang together, that is unsafe and mostly incoherent, made of journeys and of returns, of interrupted attempts, of a vain wandering on erroneous roads. Foundation is possible once you are out at sea.

A visionary-philosophic experience. 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 to be founded.

In these fading boundaries landscape, once the bonds of belonging to a supposed homeland are dissolved, languages, biographies, personal histories start their journey to a new foundation to be conceived. They melt, acquiring a new sense, a new sound appears while the outline of a new geography.

The scenic structure of the work 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 text The Root, written by Loretta Mesiti, is the core of the narration. The work gives thanks to the influences of the poet Ingeborg Bachmann, and her search of a new language, capable to re-write the boundaries.

#1. Absolute Beginners is the first movement of avVento, a multiyear 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. The avVento project arose from that feeling of disorientation and displacement, from that sort of strangeness to our time at a historic, geographic, social, identitary level. A present that does not belong us and in which we do not recognize ourselves anymore. Strangers as we are, to ourselves and to our own reality, we only can imagine a new foundation: from its origin to its trace; from its vision to its accomplishment.

TeatrInGestAzione are based in Naples. Their main stylistic feature is the strong visual impact; they purse an aesthetics based on the accuracy of presence, the simplicity of elements and the essential use of space. Their creative process aims to release the performing act from the exhibition context, re-defining the concept of scene as the space of an experimental sociality. They have been hosted in national and international contexts as l’Institut für Theater Film und Medienwissenschaft – Goethe Universität of Frankfurt am Main (Germania); Ella Fiskum Danz R.E.D. (Norvegia); La Soffitta – DAMS, Bologna; Contaminafro – CRT, Milano; Play K(ey) – Zona K, Milano; APACHE season two – Teatro Litta, Milano; Italian Performance Platform – Ipercorpo Festival, Forlì; Trasparenze Festival – Teatro dei Segni, Modena; Testimonianze Ricerca Azioni – Teatro Akropolis, Genova; Finestre sul Giovane Teatro – Teatro Ridotto, Bologna; Napoli Teatro Festival Italia – Napoli; E’(C)CENTRICO – Officine Caos, Torino; Presente/Futuro – Teatro Libero, Palermo; Contrappunti – Tam Teatromusica, Padova; Benevento Città Spettacolo – Benevento; Teatri Aperti – Firenze.

In 2011 they won the prize Movin’UP (supporting the circulation of young artists in the world, with the patronage of the Ministry of Culture).

Their pedagogic and artistic experience is collected by several degree thesis and by the publications Il tempo a Napoli, by Piermario Vescovo, Marsilio Ed., 2011; Culture Teatrali 2015 by Silvia Mei, La casa Usher Ed.; Testimonianze Ricerca Azioni AkropolisLibri Ed., 2014; Il tempo a Napoli by Piermario Vescovo, Marsilio Ed. 2011; Recito, dunque so(g)no by Pozzi and Minoia, Nuove Catarsi ed., 2009.

From 2006 to 2014 they developed a (pedagogical and creative) theatre project in Aversa Criminal Psychiatric Hospital. The project was dedicated to the internees, aiming an expressive awakening and foreseeing human dignity and its spaces. Actually the activity follows in Naples Poggioreale Jail, and it is directed to its prisoners. In 2011 they are among the funders of the Coordinamento Nazionale di Teatro in Carcere (the National Network of Theatre in Prison).

As pedagogues, they lead seminars and workshops in national and international artistic entities and they guide training projects in schools of all levels, in cultural institutions and universities. In 2008 they are among the teachers of FormArt Lavoro Salerno – Progetto di Alta Formazione per Operatori Teatrali in poor areas and prison facilities (Ministero del Lavoro; artistic direction by Ruggero Cappuccio); from 2015 to present, they are among the directors of “Arrevuoto”, a pedagogical project of youth theatre, conceived by Teatro delle Albe in collaboration with National Theatre of Naples.

From 2011 they are the creators and curators of complex projects, as Altofragile – a shared space of the genetic moment of the artistic creation (altofragile.eu) and Altofest – International Contemporary Live Arts Festival (altofest.net), that received the EFFE AWARD 2017-18 as one of the 6 top festivals in Europe. Valletta Foundation 2018 nominated them the curators of a special edition of Altofest in Malta, that will run during Valletta2018 European Capital of Culture.

foto di Valentina Quintano

Credits:

Valentina Quintano