2011>2068 AnimalePolitico Project Motus opens an enlarged and visionary front of observation, in order to “collect” imaginary projections of a “Tomorrow that makes all tremble”, moving swiftly across the intricate landscape of writers, philosophers, artists, comic book writers and revolutionary architects who have imaged (and still try to imagine) the Upcoming Future. From historical visions and cyberpunk, to completely hypothetical landscapes described by various collaborators-guests of the project. The future, needless to say, is a dangerous area to enter, heavily mined and with a tendency to turn and bite your ankles as you stride forward. James Graham Ballard, The Complete Short Stories. New York City: W.W. Norton & Company (2009). We are building a series of Public Acts, which, between utopias and dystopias, libertarian and catastrophic visions, see each time the engagement of Silvia Calderoni with different artists and free thinkers, young actors but also older people, animals, inhabitants of the net, economists, scientists, philosophers and political refugees… who are invited to give their “Long Goodbye to Today” and imagine, without limits or inhibitory factors, other forms of existence, resistance, subsistence, resonance, community, communication, cooperation, inhabitation… and, of course, revolution! Each impulse, each stance implies a possible vision of the future, a change, a far away projection, whether political, economic or artistic… This is a journey which we have subtitled “Encounters with extraordinary men, women and novels”, articulated in different performative actions and Mucchio Misto Workshop residency-workshops, in various cities in Europe and the Mediterranean area. THE PLOT IS THE REVOLUTION was the first Public Act inaugurating in July 2011 this new itinerary (http://vimeo.com/27626343 ). It was the extraordinary encounter between “two Antigones”, Silvia Calderoni and the mythical figure of contemporary theatre, eighty-five-year-old Judith Malina, who, after having seen Too Late! in New York last year, fell so utterly in love with the company’s work that she asked to be on stage with Silvia… And we did it, even though it seemed impossible to everyone! Besides, it is in the direction of where “there is something breaking the order”, and wanting change, that we have decided to move with this new theatrical adventure, introduced by the confrontation with the outlook of an anarchic artist and activist like Judith Malina, a stubborn pacifist who has lived and seen so much. We have dug her biography, almost like in an interview, to reflect upon facts and transformations of the here and now, in response to the revolt that, NOW, is taking place all over the planet.

We take into consideration the word plot in all of its meanings, as map, diagram, but also story. This double significance is present also in Italian with the word trama: plot as theme, synthesis of the meaning of a text or of a performance, but also in the sense of strategy, plotting against something, an activity aiming at the actualization of a goal. The plot is thus an open plot, a subject without subject, which welcomes and tries to create a community of dialogue and transversal performativity across the arts, listening to the transformations which are already taking place in order to imagine new possible scenarios.

Judith Malina is a piece of history, which annoys her, but of which she also is incredibly aware. And, in her own way, satisfied. What does not satisfy her of having become history, is that she cannot put

into motion a new mechanism of transformation. If only history became manure, or nourishment, or color of the horizon, or cuts of light for the generations to come! If only she could solicit, from the depths of her undomesticated

veins, new insubordinations and new experiences spilling over from previous experiences, spilling over from the tracks of traditions!

Cristina Valenti, Conversazioni con Judith Malina, Titivilus Edizioni, 2008

The second movement to be included in the project Making the Plot, is the performance “W.3 Public Acts”, created for the Festival di Dro in July 2012; this is an evolution of the work presented at the end of the residency held at Les Subsistances in Lyon in April 2012 in the context of “Projet ça tremble !” (Project we tremble!) A trilogy which, drawing inspiration from A Scanner Darkly, a novel by Philip K. Dick, investigates themes like surveillance, viral proliferation of ever growing sci-fi-like systems, “obsessive digitalization” of public (and private) spaces. In this reflection upon “control of the body”, we find the impulse for this future journey on which the performance NELLA TEMPESTA will take us.

W.

3 PUBLIC ACTS July 20th-21st, 2012 - Drodesera Festival, Dro (TN) September 14th-15th, 2012 - Short Theatre Festival, Roma

12pm: Where > 6pm: When > 12am: Who

Keeping our eyes open and reacting to the facts like wolves in the forest, fast, without leaving traces, venturing alone, away from the pack, or moving in a pack as a single body… Building shelters, other-spaces from which to observe and, in the unfathomable, manufacture new docks, to re-locate Today and imagine fluorescent Tomorrows. On the journey towards NELLA TEMPESTA, we break the scenic evolution into three Acts arising from a single restlessness: what is the future prefiguration which scares us the most?

The answers found are many and manifold, but they all share common core: control, and material or surreptitious reduction of (political and artistic) freedom. The three adverbs/titles are not followed by a question mark. They remain suspended evocations of times, spaces and individualities.

I) WHEN: a Solitary-Act, a fast-paced contradictory between director and actor about scenic freedom, about the dichotomy between inside and outside, movement and control, disobedience and compliance, also as reflection to the controversial proliferation of surveillance equipments (in all fields, theatre included)… Yet, who controls? Who decides what is normal and what isn’t? Which behavior is to be considered suspicious? And, most specifically, is the perimeter-setting of public spaces, the continuous mapping transforming our city centers into immense Panopticons, truly reducing the so-called deviant behaviors? Statistics do not confirm it… The loss of control on one’s own time, space, body… are prodromes of a lot of dystopical sci-fi-like reality. We have decided to start an experiment, here still a prototype, but preluding and announcing future developments. A director and an actor on a stage, the eyes of the audience and the “obscure scanning” of a surveillance camera. Where. Am. I. And When? P.K. Dick and Michel Foucault are indicating us the road.

II) WHERE: an Assembly-Act built upon accounts and utopist impulses of a multitude of artists/activists/friends who are networking across this transformation and trying to invent a new vocabulary. Italy, in the last years, has lived the unexpected growth of single “liberated” or “differently managed” spaces, with whom we share a dialogue from a long time: dancing heteropies, of which Foucault would have been happy.

III) WHO: a nocturnal Choral-Act, where performer and audience merge in an orgonic quasi-dance… Contact and con-fusion. Everybody can be, if they want: try-outs of mimicry to elude surveillance. “The future enters us before it happens”, writes Rainer Maria Rilke. (…) Mon corps, en fait, il est toujours ailleurs, il est lié à tous les ailleurs du monde, et à vrai dire il est ailleurs que dans le monde. Car c’est autour de lui que les choses sont disposées, c’est par rapport à lui -- et par rapport à lui comme par rapport à un souverain -- qu’il y a un dessus, un dessous, une droite, une gauche, un avant, un arrière, un proche, un lointain. Le corps est le point zéro du monde, là où les chemins et les espaces viennent se croiser le corps n’est nulle part : il est au coeur du monde ce petit noyau utopique à partir duquel je rêve, je parle, j’avance, j’imagine, je perçois les choses en leur place et je les nie aussi par le pouvoir indéfini des utopies que j’imagine. Mon corps est comme la Cité du Soleil, il n’a pas de lieu, mais c’est de lui que sortent et que rayonnent tous les lieux possibles, réels ou utopiques. Michel Foucault , Le Corps utopique Conférence radiophonique sur France-Culture,1966

MUCCHIOMISTO WORKSHOP

Another phase in our research is the Mucchio Misto Workshop series, which started in the Fall 2011 at the Festival Vie di Modena; our first workshop, held in the former offices of the Festival, gathered a group of 15 North African young people, some of which had recently arrived in Italy, and others who were second generation immigrants. The MMW have a changing nature, they follow the evolution of the creative process and, from one time to the next, they bring together participants from different social and artistic contexts, all with a different training or education… The last MucchioMisto, organized in April 2012 by the independent cultural center Angelo Mai in Rome, was conceived for young performers, and had the subtitle “La foresta è indispensabile” (“Our forest is essential”). Here is an excerpt of the presentation of the project: The forest is a vast non humanly inhabited or constructed zone, where the vegetation grows spontaneously and invades. It provides oxygen for the survival of aerobic beings, food for herbivores, as well as shelter for a good part of the wild animal world. It is a place for the “stranger”, a den of “law-breakers”, shamans and werewolves…

This is why we like it, because it is necessary to the breath of those who do not stand surveillance, of those who love losing themselves and disappearing, or disappearing to then come back changed, of those who love observing the flora and the fauna as they follow undisturbed paths. Of those who like building shelters where to rest and think again about the “coarse labors of life”. (H.D. Thoreau). During three days, the indoor and outdoor Angelo Mai spaces were transformed into a nomad camp where to live, eat, sleep… where to manufacture forms and formats of uneducated art. “It isn’t a workshop where we transmit knowledge, but a workshop of doing and living together. We will attempt, in this short time, to redraw the geography of an “Elsewhere” place – as Angelo defines itself – inviting every night the audience to enter and observe the small performances in the various “shelters”, which we will build – together. If you want to be a part of MucchioMisto, imagine your shelter in the spaces of Angelo Mai, or bring your own tent and sleeping bag in which you can create. Time dilates itself, space transforms itself.”

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices…

Caliban, The Tempest Our experience in Rome has been incredibly intense. Every night, the space opened to the audience, which moved from a dwelling place to the other “participating” to the 22 performances created by the young people who took part in our transitory residencies. A blog was born from this experience: http://mucchiomisto.blogspot.it/. During this upcoming year, new MucchioMisto Workshop will be held: - Teatro Valle Occupato in Rome (December 2012), - La Bellone (Cifas) in Brussels (February 2013), Throughout these workshops we will define the final cast of the new performance, which entails, together with Silvia Calderoni, the presence of other 3/4 actors. The weaving of this new plot will continue with other Public Acts and creative residencies, to coagulate into NELLA TEMPESTA which will open in May 2013.

NELLA TEMPESTA

A Motus PERFORMANCE 2011>2068 AnimalePolitico Project

Created and Directed by Enrico Casagrande + Daniela Nicolò

With Silvia Calderoni + Glen Çaçi + Ilenia Caleo + Fortunato Leccese + Paola Stella Minni

Dramaturgy Daniela Nicolò Assistant Director Nerina Cocchi Sound & Video Technician Andrea Gallo + Alessio Spirli (Aqua Micans Group) Drawing “Moltitudini” de Marzia Dalfini Graphic Design Maddalena Fragnito Web Communication Emanuel Balbinot, Sara Giulia Braun, Camilla Pin Web Photo Images Corrado Gemini, Luca Chiaudano Organisation & Production Elisa Bartolucci Management & Communication Lisa Gilardino + Sandra Angelini Logistics Valentina Zangari Management and distribution for France Ligne Directe / Judith Martin

Coproduction Festival TransAmériques, Montréal + Théâtre National de Bretagne, Rennes + Parc de la Villette, Paris + La Comédie de Reims - Scène d’Europe, Reims + Kunstencentrum Vooruit vzw, Ghent + La Filature - Scène Nationale, Mulhouse + Festival delle Colline Torinesi, Torino + Associazione Culturale dello Scompiglio, Vorno + Centrale Fies - Drodesera Festival, Dro + L’Arboreto - Teatro Dimora, Mondaino

with the support of ERT (Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione) + AMAT + La Mama, New York + Provincia de Rimini + Regione Emilia-Romagna + MiBAC

with the collaboration of Teatro Valle Occupato, Roma + Angelo Mai Occupato, Roma + Macao, Milano + S.a.L.E. Docks, Venezia

Motus thanks Voina, Judith Malina, Giuliana Sgrena, Darja Stocker, Mohamed Ali Ltaief, Anastudio, Exyzt, Mammafotogramma, Re-Biennale and all the participants to every MucchioMisto Workshops.

Work timeline: December ‘12: - MucchioMisto Workshop @ Teatro Valle Occupato, Rome

- Istant City “Nomadic Architecture Workshop” @ Centrale Fies, Dro (I) February ‘13: - Creative residency @ Vooruit, Ghent (B)

- MucchioMisto Workshop @ La Bellone CIFAS, Brussels (B) April ‘13: - Creative residency @ Tenuta dello Scompiglio, Vorno (I)

- Creative residency @ Teatro Dimora, Mondaino (I) May ‘13: - Final rehearsals @ Place des Arts, Montreal (CA)

World Premiere: 24-27 May 2013 Fta Festival TransAmériques, Montréal (CA) www.fta.qc.ca

“Our utopist imagination has been dramatically atrophied in the asphyxiating atmosphere of an apocalyptic predication, (climatic catastrophe, energy reduction, extinction of animals species, economic disaster, war for resources) that it seems

much easier to imagine a dying world rather a better one. But it is precisely when utopia becomes unfathomable that it is necessary.

This utopia is neither a “nowhere Land” nor a an escape, or a universal system, or a perfect future, but something which hits us in the stomach, which reminds us that we shouldn’t accept the crumbles of the present.

There is always somewhere to go.” Les Sentiers de l’Utopie, Isabelle Fremeaux e John Jordan, La Découverte, Paris, 2011

“What happens now” is the question raised at the end of Alexis. Una tragedia greca, the last performance we built hunting down the traces of an Antigone in today’s world. Alexandra Sarantopoulou, on stage, states that, for her, the key of the answer to this questions lies in a graffiti that some young people did on a wall in Athens:

Ερχόμαστε από το μέλλον

WE COME FROM THE FUTURE They place themselves in the future, because they are the future, a future which Huxley and Orwell had drawn in gloomy colors, but which maybe has some surprise in store: The future, needless to say, is a dangerous area to enter, heavily mined and with a tendency to turn and bite your ankles as you stride forward. James Graham Ballard, The Complete Short Stories. New York City, W.W. Norton & Company (2009). As a matter of fact, in order to read the present, it is perhaps more efficient to look beyond the line of the horizon of the immediate; since 2011, we have opened an enlarged and visionary front of observation, darting into the intricate landscape of revolutionary writers, philosophers, artist-activists, comic book writers and architects who have imagined (and still try to imagine) the Upcoming Future. In Brave New World, Huxley describes the process through which we become accomplices of our own enslavement, seduced into submission… And the perfect and inhuman world that appears in the title is a quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest…

« How beauteous mankind is! O Brave New World that has such people in't! »

William Shakespeare, The Tempest Never could we imagine that the tension towards the future would have thrown us into the opposite direction, all the way into 17th Century… But that’s how it went; reading and rereading this ambiguous work, we have found – transfigured – so many surprising coincidences with many of the questions that have been tormenting us for so long, that we have decided to “throw ourselves” into the tempest… For instance, one of the first lines of the text is: “Where is the master?” This question bounces between the King and the Boatswain, while the boat is at the mercy of furious waves in front of which the words of a chief are of no use… What cares these roares for the name of King?…

From this point of view, this tempest immediately becomes the storm of a social and political universe to be completely re-founded (and the current Italian political climate is a testimony of this), through the contact with the diversity of an alien island and with the stranger who inhabits it. The island, in the Renaissance imaginary, is the utopist world as an alternative to authority, oppression, usurpation… a marginal limen allowing or welcoming an upside down world. But the island is not only the fantastic “brave new world” described by Miranda, but also an imaginary construction of the playwright’s mind with all the incongruences of its creator-director. Seafaring and the ship itself evoke, as Foucault has proven, images of marginalization and movement (or removal). One need only think of the Ship of Fools or the desperate rafts full of refugees crossing the Mediterranean… The traveller becomes in this perspective the “passenger par excellence” or the “prisoner of the passage” – we are still quoting Foucault. The island thus becomes the representation of dislocation, in which the Tempest is simulated and provoked… conceived from top to bottom by Prospero and perfectly “controlled” by a swift Ariel, daring in his art of camouflage. There are many assonances with the apprehensions regarding the never-ending desire of freedom that has kept our motor burning in our wandering at the borders of theatre. It is a text encapsulating in its fabric many turmoils, many levels of havoc and many more storms, at the individual level as well as on the systematic one; the economic Macrotempest in which we are immersed, which can always be reconnected to the themes of control and of the unconsidered use of financial power, as well as the Macrotempest impersonating the hostile relationship between different ethnicities, like among the migrant-workers arriving nowadays on the Lampedusa island (which many critics even come to identify as “possible Shakespearian island”)… Here one also finds the eternal conflict between generations, fathers and sons, which we already faced on our path around Antigone… and, last but not least, the tempest unsettles those who, as they overthrow the relationship between margins and central vision, try to question the principle itself of representation, in their possible relationship of subversion with reality and politics. Creating a play-within-the-play, Prospero – as Shakespeare does – knows that it is not possible anymore to be only actors or spectators. This alternation or coexistence of roles is indicative of the uncertain, risky mobility of a life taken in an eminent political direction. To take the risk of navigating the open sea or being thrown into the stormy waves can provoke a complete loss of anchorage of one’s body, to the point of sinking into the abyss or fortuitously landing on a shore. But to remain on land is not as safe as it used to be, it rather is a temporary permanence as preparation to a new, risky voyage. All of Shakespeare’s text, in spite of its apparently happy conclusion (or at least an opening towards new paths…) “is marked by unfixable cracks, by sounds and screeching voices, by noises coming from all over; from the guts of the earth (Caliban), from the untouchable and transparent ether (Ariel, who is agent provocateur as well as assistant director), from the memory of the origins (Sycorax), from the lust for vengeance for Prospero’s suffering of wrong doing against him… (which many have associated with the same anger of Guy Fawkes), from Miranda and Fernando’s perfect love story, which immediately places them “outside of the story”… to the sad restlessness of the King/playwright who has to leave the island/stage for other times, other magic, other hands, as he says goodbye to his own audience with the words “Let your indulgence set me free”, a melancholic wish of fragile and stubborn hope… … And the fact that the work finishes with the word free is, and has been, with no doubts one of the many reasons that have pushed us towards those stormy and ambivalent waters. Even the dramaturgy is fragmented on several fronts; on one side, the study of those mechanisms of “control of the body” has pushed us to meet those “who keep watch”, those people who sit at the screens of the surveillance cameras’ monitors, (Prospero and Ariel?), or also to explicitly ask passers-by in the street “Where is the master?”(and getting the most unpredictable answers)… On the other side, we have been brought to gather testimonies by “those who avoid surveillance” (Caliban?), those people who are building strategies of invisibility and libertarian anonymity, moving across today’s pockets of resistance, communities and minority groups who have chosen to live according to other “perspectives”, in which tomorrow is being thrivingly cultivated, like the one

recently founded by the authors of “Les Sentiers de l’Utopie” in Brittony, quoted earlier on… but also with Russian activists Voina with whom we have shared a period (of their clandestinity) in Italy. The accumulated material is then “ground” with the actors on the stage, to come to a performance in which also the audience-community will have an active and determining role in order to create a sort of ISTANT CITY or better, ISTANT

COMMUNITY! The goal is to transform the theatres hosting the show into spaces to re-build and inhabit: stages/islands where to land and assemble temporary shelters or small scenarios as fragments of representations, within the performance. Lightning-like sets to compose and decompose. During the “Nomad Architecture Workshop” that we held at the Fies Factory in December 2012 with different collectives of architects, we asked ourselves: “What is the first shelter after a hurricane, a shipwreck or an armed conflict?” The most immediate answer was: a blanket. A blanket is also the simplest object to find and redistribute in every city. Everybody has old blankets at home. They can be found cheaply in markets or second-hand shops, and associations that assist Migrants or homeless people always need them. That is how we have found the “set” of NELLA TEMPESTA: only and exclusively blankets, which we will find in every city in which we move. We do not want to waste any more money on “dead sets”. Instead, we want to work with materials that, at the end of our tour (or even of every date), can be “donated” to independent spaces of each city so that they can be recycled and reutilized. The goal is, with the help of our local “accomplices”, to invite inhabitant-spectators to come to the theatre with blankets from home. The show will begin only if there will be this initial collaboration; it will be the audience who, with their research and their commitment, will make the show possible! A participated, widened creation to set a camp, an instantaneous, nomad city, as nomad has been, up until now, our path. A little stage revolution, where DOING is placed at the centre, and the work removed from the logics of weariness which relegate it more and more in the sphere of dissatisfaction. A polycentric COMMON DOING. We will be the FUSE crossing the stage, which will explode in small fires of questions about the present, and burning dialogues about imaginative future landscapes, created from fragments of novels by authors who have influenced, throughout the years, our own artistic process, like: P.K. Dick, W. Gibson, H.D. Thoreau, J.G. Ballard, C. McCarthy, D. DeLillo, W. Morris, A. Huxley and, of course, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Une Tempête by Aimé Césaire. The challenge is to move a car without gas, but with a blazing and alternative fuel. Why not trying to use the time of a theatrical performance to act upon the visionary and energetic charge that the stage brings within itself? Why not trying to transform the theatrical contract into an open formula of reciprocal exchange, as we try to deconstruct from within the proxemics of the relationship between who acts and who watches? We want to actualize progressive movements within the geography of the scenic space, and let it be clear: without any forced involvement on the part of the audience. We want to use the “temporariness” of the staged event to create a different ZONE from our own life experiences. Living a historical moment, in which speed and the “fetishism of commodity” have determined a false and tyrannical cultural unity, has paradoxically generated “new gypsies”: psychic travellers pushed by desire, curiosity or necessity. Artists have become the new nomad, homeless, instable and … pirate community. We, “the Communityless Community, the Community without the We-Community”, have realized that the only possible form of community (beyond political activism) is the one we live on the stage, with the audience members of every city in which we move… as we build temporary, poly-prospective heterotopiae. As “political animals”, we thus bring to the stage an experience of reappropriation, in the spaces, in the experiences themselves, always immersed in the Shakespearean tempest in which, let’s remember this, does not appear a world at end, but on the verge of a new beginning.

“The tempest is not, in this context, a goodbye to theatre, but rather the ground for a new great theatrical proposition… The proposition of a theatre that is not only show but also experience, not only imitation or reflection or suspension or escape from every day life, but life in itself.” (Agostino Lombardo, introduction to the Italian translation of The Tempest by W. Shakespeare published by Garzanti) Enjoy the journey!

Motus

via Castore, 49 47923 Rimini, Italy tel fax +39 0541 326067 www.motusonline.com info@motusonline.com sur Facebook Motus Rimini : www.facebook.com/pages/Motus/93219706774 Follow Motus on motustwit Diffusion and Communication : Lisa Gilardino zonamotus@motusonline.com Sandra Angelini relazioni@motusonline.com Production : Elisa Bartolucci organizzazione@motusonline.com Project development et diffusion en France : Ligne Directe - www.lignedirecte.net Judith Martin +33(0)6 70 63 47 58 - judith.martin@lignedirecte.net Audrey Ardiet +33(0)6 80 70 41 66 - audrey.ardiet@lignedirecte.net