A Teatro Nucleo’s production with the support of Emilia-Romagna’s Region and Italian Cultural Ministry Mibact. Presented for the firts time on November 2017 at the Officine Caos Theatre in Turin, Italy
Directed by Natasha Czertok with Annamaria D’Adamo, Daniele Giuliani, Marco Luciano, Martina Pagliucoli, Veronica Ragusa, Chiara Venturini, Natasha Czertok music by The Busy Bee, Balanescu Quartet,Steve Reich,Alessio Bettoli,Alfonso Santimone Production Design Teatro Nucleo , RedoLab artigiani del riutilizzo, Luca Bernasconi Stage Costumes Chiara Zini video Anne Corporaal technical part
Alessio Bettoli, Franco Campioni
“The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not dream of escape. A system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, slaves would love their servitude.”
(Aldus Huxley)
After the first work-study presented at the Differenti Sensazioni’s Festival in Turin, Italy on November 2017, Domino‘s work-in-progress was presented on May 2018 in Modena as part of the Trasparenze‘s Festival, and in in Pontelagoscuro ( Ferrara) as a preview of the Totem‘s Festival, organized by the Teatro Nucleo, the next appointment will be on June 20th in Bologna, for the festival “Theater in Communities” .
In the dystopian present of DOMINO, a theatre metaphor of the present that we live every day, there is no good and bad, the characters move as pawns of a cruel game, cold gears and functions of a perverse system that seems to leave no way out. The heart of the game is a mysterious selection-mechanism to which the four women leads are subjected, supervised and conducted through the various phases of the process by three guardians, driven by a perennial and disturbing smile. On the stage stands a metallic parallelepiped, a mysterious and cryptic cube, an allegory of a power increasingly difficult to identify and therefore subvert, which will mark the stages of selection that will lead to the choice of one of the four competitors / prisoners.
The phases which the “monolith” imposes are:
1 admission of competitors / prisoners to selection
2 the contract for acceptance of the terms of participation
3 the hate race
4 selection
Unique rules of the race:
All forms of solidarity are forbidden; any form of rebellion and criticality is forbidden to the mechanisms of the selection system; but not always everything runs smoothly, and even in this glacial, ironic, acid atmosphere the “human” is always on the verge of emerging, … blossoming, forcing the guardians to sedate them with almost imperceptible violence, however finely subtle, every emotional”symptom”, every jam that could cause the selection system to stop, and at the end, as the four competitors try to resist, defending their visions and their hopes, the system will finish its work, will get its new adept , with a quiet, linear, … chilling practice.
But we know that dreams are something that we can seldom destroy altogether, we know that a dream is a positive germ, a gem capable of living without land, without water, without sun, something that can remain dormant for 10, 100 , 1000 years, and that will eventually return to shine, build, radiate, breathe.
Drawing inspiration from novels such as ‘1984’, from Orwell, ‘The New World’ by Huxley, ‘The Tale of the Girl’ by Margaret Atwood, Domino wants to bring attention through a multidisciplinary language ranging from dance, visual projections, theater and music, on the progressive decline of primary goods, on the concrete, slow and gradual loss of freedom of thought, on the rise of new walls and even social borders, on poetry as an instrument of salvation, on the need to believe in something or someone. On the uprising as a necessary act.
Our work, structured through a long theatre research, also in a methodological key, does not want to provide answers or peculiar interpretations, our theatre practice is based on the concept of “here and now”in relation to the viewers, who will face a story staged that in a crude (in the Artaudian sense) and direct, free from tinsel and theatre’s embellishments.
Domino is a classic show, in the sense of ancient and primordial. A ritual, if we want to meet-clash with issues and problems that too often our society refuses to investigate and deal with.
Review by Simone Azzoni, ( d’Ars Magazine )
“A long border that starts from Grotowski, passes from Artaud and arrives straight to the Teatro Nucleo: the hard and pure who have not bent to compromise to throw the stone of provocation (good for “sponsored “festivals) and hide the hand behind the artifice of aesthetics.
(…)
We can cite the Greek model of theater as a political agora, or the dystopic literature to which it draws heavily (Orwell, Huxley, Atwood) but also with the cinematography it is not joking and on the smiling faces, enhances the image inspired by Lang’s Metropolis , Kubrick’s 2001 A space Odyssey (for the monolith), Spieblerg’s Schindler’s List (the final child) or Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. ”
(…)
The very vital Annamaria D’Adamo, Daniele Giuliani, Marco Luciano, Martina Pagliucoli, Veronica Ragusa, Chiara Venturini, Natasha Czertok denude themselves to tell us how the emptied contents’s rituals become violence and the homologation preached by Pasolini risks to pass more simply via videogames . We like the voice to be extradiegetic, metallic and artificial, off-field that it determines and sorts. We also like that the border between orgy and liberation is all in the hands of the actors.
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