Meetings by Sara Chiappori & Renata Viola

The relationship with reality presses the performing arts, interrogates them and inhabits them, both object and habitat of an investigation that mixes grammar and semantics of the languages of the scene, re-discussing the concept of author and interpreter, reformulating the criteria of fruition and appropriation of space, definitively clearing the new technologies, opening explicit connections with sociology, urban planning, statistics, political discourse, economics.

ZONA K has given account of all this in the last few seasons, pointing out the critical points of reflection, ethics before aesthetics, around and within the contemporary. Hence, the need to open a theoretical window to try a further investigation that leaves room for doubts rather than certainties.

Designed for a diverse audience, spectators, operators, university students, curious and restless citizens, REALITY? has the ambition to make the languages of the scene react like in a chemical experiment with the alphabets of other disciplines, comparing artists who have worked with ZONA K and theorists who have deepened the same themes, but from the point of view of their skills.

The meetings will be published simultaneously on   e   di  ZONA K

• Monday 23 November, 6.00 p.m.
  PROLOGUE: POLITIK DER BLICKE/THE POLITICS OF LOOKS
  meeting with JENS HILLJE (artistic co-director and chief dramturg at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement Biennale Teatro 2019)

 

Then, four keywords for four dialogues

• Tuesday 24th November, 6.00 p.m.
  LANDSCAPE: dialogue between VITTORIO LINGIARDI and DOM- (IT): because it feeds new dramaturgies of the space that cross the places, putting in crisis the very notion of look. Because our relationship with the landscape involves the whole body and is always a question of relationships, with others, with the world, with rules, with time, with borders.

 

• Wednesday 25th November, 6.00 p.m.
  CRISIS dialogue between SALVATORE NATOLI and AGRUPACION SEÑOR SERRANO (ES): because “the crisis” in which we live has become a permanent and structural condition. Today, more than ever, we live in a state of emergency that forces us to reformulate new future scenarios. We are called to radically rethink everything we gave for certain and for acquired. Can all this really be considered an opportunity like the media storytelling suggests or are we on the threshold of a sort of “human revolution”?

 

• Thursday 26 November, 6.00 p.m.
  POLITICS dialogue between JUSEPPE GENNA and VALTERS SĪLIS (LV): because we have all decreed its death, or at least embarrassment and impoverishment, but we cannot do without it. So let’s go and find it where it manifests itself in its worst forms, the fascist sovereignist populist drifts, the last temptation of a West orphaned of an alternative thought to 20th century ideologies.

 

• Friday 27 November, 6.00 p.m.
  GAME/PARTICIPATION dialogue between STEFANO BARTEZZAGHI and ROGER BERNAT (ES): because the playful approach can be the key, but also the trap. If contemporary performance has accustomed us to enjoy the theatrical fact as a game, are we willing to give up in terms of attention, concentration, intellectual effort? The game, however, is not only a deresponsible escape, it can also be a very serious business.

REALITY?

In the presentation of the Reality 2020 season we told our vision of reality that did not want to translate into a philosophical disquisition or a flattening on the spectacularization of contemporary media. It was a title that wanted to close a three-year period where ample space was given to artists who have done their research and art from the Theater of Reality. A three-year period that started with Power and continued with Economy in which we felt the need to analyze and interpret the present, always keeping an eye on the so-called reality data as a rudder that keeps the course despite the brazen and unrepentant political propaganda that does not fear neither the self-contradiction nor the explicit lie.

Of that season – which should have been structured in the Global, Human and Virtual focuses – we just had time to present the special event that went beyond the focus but which for us had the symbolic flavor of a first show that ZONA K brought into Casa degli Artisti.

Then everything, as for everyone, stopped. The companies were first warned, then put on stand by, and finally the shows were canceled. Suddenly our strength, our distinctive trait, our identity and consistency in design choices and consolidated international relationships have become our boomerang. How to keep up a season that would have included numerous European artists? How to reopen a space where the distancing measures force to have no more than 20 spectators? How to look beyond the obstacle to imagine and build a new reality?

The word “new” was enough to re-tune us and to start again from where we left off. If it is a new reality that we have to live, then our season can be called REALITY ?. The question mark not only closes a questioning sentence, but also summarizes the amazement, perplexity and ultimately the hope that this is not really a new world to be invented, but a phase, a parenthesis not to be archived and from which to start again.

We therefore start from the desire to find a new meaning to reality, new perspectives, new ways of enjoying culture thanks to a continuous comparison with some of the artists who have accompanied us most in recent years. Thus the new autumn season that has emerged continues the path started where possible and leaves much more space for those distinctive features that have characterized our work in past years: complex projects, urban performances, shows for a few spectators at a time, collaboration with theaters larger to accommodate artists who need the stage. The most important novelty is the desire to give more space and time to the shows in the season with, on our part, an important productive effort: many of the shows we offer are real productions and co-productions. It is a choice that was already in the making and that found a boost in the pandemic: to continue working on an annual season, but with even more our projects that are able to sustain a long life and that do not run out in the space of a few reruns. 

Events:

15 – 24 September 2020
UNDER COVID
Gianmarco Maraviglia
curated by Chiara Oggioni Tiepolo
[photographic exhibition]