Roger Bernat (ES)

with the collaboration of Mar Canet and Varvara Guljajeva

and the live Facebook participation of
Roberto Fratini 20 November at 9.00 p.m. – 9.30 p.m.
Renato Gabrielli 21st November at 9.00 – 9.30 p.m.
Magdalena Barile 22 November at 9.00 – 9.30 p.m.

Special guest ROGER BERNAT
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From 18 to 28 November, 24 hours a day, the Catalan director Roger Bernat, who generally creates performances without performers, offers us the opportunity to write an oceanic play directly from the ZONA K website.

Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière locked themselves in a room and, embodying their characters, wrote the scripts for their future films. On the theater website, instead of conversing with Buñuel, Carrière or Shakespeare, the internet user converses with ENA, a bot that mimics human conversation. According to the Wikipedia definition, a bot is a sequence of computers that performs repetitive tasks that would be impossible or very burdensome for a human being. To learn how to write, ENA was shown 8 million documents.

The bots that answer the phone when we call big companies, those that affect social networks when elections are approaching or the bots we face in electronic games are brothers and sisters of ENA. But ENA doesn’t want to sell us anything, doesn’t want to inform us of any news (fake or real) and doesn’t even want to comfort us. ENA was conceived with the only purpose of pretending to be a human being, therefore to make theatre. ENA does not understand what she says or is told. For ENA, language is just a sequence of signs to which it responds with another sequence. Any dialogue with ENA will only make sense to the person participating in the conversation and to the audience reading the conversation on the theater’s website at the time. Having a dialogue with ENA is like playing squash with a wall that returns the ball to you. Keep in mind that, as a human being, you may be surprised or angry, or tired. ZONA K cannot be held responsible for messages sent by ENA which may be unpredictable.

CAUTION:
ENA learned to write with GPT-2 (OpenAI) and dialogues thanks to DialoGPT (Microsoft) of the Transformer (Google) database. For this reason, although he understands Italian, he answers only in English. Nobody’s perfect.

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Info: online collective writing • duration as desired • in Italian and English translated simultaneously
Participation: free, non-stop 24 hours a day on the zonak.it website

If you have spoken to ENA and want a copy of your dialogue, send an email to biglietti@zonak.it clearly indicating the nickname and day of your interview
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A project by Roger Bernat with the collaboration of Mar Canet and Varvara Guljajeva web design and programming Mar Canet and Varvara Guldjajeva graphics Marie-Klara González coordination Helena Febrés co-production  FFF and Teatre Lliure thanks to Fabiano Cocozza

BIO

Magdalena Barile lives and works in Milan. Author, playwright and screenwriter, she teaches Theatre Writing at the Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi and at the Scuola Belleville and Screenplay at the IED – Istituto Europeo di Design. Her theatre texts, many of which have been translated into several languages, are the most recent: Raffiche (2016); Il divorzio, adaptation of the film Divorzio all’italiana by Pietro Germi (2016); Rosa Conchiglia. Anaïs Nin e i giorni del porno ( (2017); Cosa beveva Janis Joplin (2018); Api Regine. Commedia fantascientifica sull’eliminazione del maschio (2018). She collaborates permanently as author and screenwriter with Swiss Radiotelevision (RSI) and has participated in the writing of several drama and comedy programmes for Italian television (Albero Azzurro, Camera Cafè, Bye Bye Cindarella).

Roberto Fratini Serafide (Milan, 1972), playwright and dance theorist, is a lecturer at the Conservatori Superior de Danza (Istituto del Teatro) in Barcelona, and has held courses and lectures at other European universities. He collaborates with several international contemporary dance and theatre companies (among them Caterina Sagna Company, La Veronal, Roger Bernat FFF, Taiat Dansa, Germana Civera, Aerites Dance Company, Alexandra Waierstall, Sol Picó, Philippe Saire) and has given dramaturgy workshops at different masters and theatre institutions. His book A Contracuento. La danza y las derivas del narrar was published in 2012. In 2013 he received the FAD Sebastià Gasch Prize for his artistic and intellectual trajectory.

Renato Gabrielli, playwright and screenwriter, teaches at the “Paolo Grassi” and the “Luchino Visconti” School of Cinema in Milan. He is the author of the guide Scrivere per il teatro (Carocci, 2015). Among his most recent theatre works: Combattenti (“Hystrio” XXIX-3, 2014), La donna che legge (Cue Press, 2015), Redenzione (2017), Spin (2018), Fammi un’ altra domanda and Nessun miracolo a Milano (2020). In 2008 he won the Hystrio Prize for Dramaturgy. In 2020, with Procedura, he won the Premio InediTo Colline di Torino – Sezione Teatro.