FOCUS: HUMAN

In Edgar Allan Poe’s story The man of the crowd, a chaotic and unpredictable world is described in which fascination and horror coexist. We are all witnesses and actors in a show where roles and origins are mixed in incessant movement. The crowd appears as a mysterious and disturbing entity that overpowers and annihilates the individual. Starting from the ideas of Poe’s story, the show explores the darkness that has characterised these last decades. Unhappiness, insecurity, suffering and uncertainty trigger fear and violence, a regression compared to the level of “civilization”, laboriously conquered and by now considered consolidated in Europe like in the United States, in India like in Australia and elsewhere. We live in a world that is more connected but less integrated. Resentment has become a global epidemic. We are stuck in the belly of a beast. Who is this beast? Are we this beast? Are they? Who are they? Think with your gut, when you have forgotten about your heart.

Conceived, written and performed by Isabelle Kralj, Mark Anderson and Alessandro Renda, the show is a gathering of three different countries, three cultures, different stories and languages, but with the same fears, the same questions, the same desires, the same insecurities. In the Belly of the Beast builds a multi-layered structure of stories, using different stylistic approaches and languages, alternating reality and dream, alienation and solidarity, irony and poetry. Between past and present. On the stage of the Theatre Season 2020 REALITY, a diverse and frantic humanity, figures of today and shadows from the past who present themselves through monologues and dialogues, music, video and movement.

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c/o ZONA K

Info: show • duration 80 min. • in English, Slovenian and Italian with surtitles

Standard ticket: 15 € – Students/under 26/over 65/groups 10€

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By and with Mark Anderson, Isabelle Kralj, Alessandro Renda, production Theatre Gigante (USA), Teatro delle Albe / Ravenna Teatro (IT)

In 2014, the show of the Teatro delle Albe Noise in the waters (by Marco Martinelli, with Alessandro Renda on stage) was on tour in the United States, guest at the La Mama Theater in New York, then in New Jersey and in Chicago. In Chicago, thanks to the invitation of Thomas Simpson (associate professor at Northwestern University of Chicago and translator in English of many important Italian authors, including Marco Martinelli), Isabelle Kralj and Mark Anderson, co-directors of Gigante Theater, attended the show and decided to host it in their city, Milwaukee (Wisconsin). That is how a fertile collaboration began that brought Alessandro Renda back to the United States the year after. The artistic bond between Isabelle Kralj, Mark Anderson and Alessandro Renda has been renewed in Italy, in Ravenna. The In the Belly of the Beast project is a new collaboration between the two companies in search of harmony, resonances and differences between poetry. It is the first co-production of the Teatro delle Albe with an American company and for the Giant Theatre it is the first co-production with a European company.