Arosio/Boscaro e
Teatro Utile/ Mascherenere
The body, the media, towards a transnational identity
Two companies meet for a project on the theme of identity.
The artistic duo Ariosio/Boscaro and the company Teatro Utile/Mascherenere accept ZONA K’s invitation to collaborate in a research project on intercultural issues.
Ariosio/Boscaro provide Focus Identity with their research programme Per un Novissimo Bestiario, whose aim is the definition of a bestiary dedicated to the “symbolic beings” of the contemporary world and their skills in contact and videomapping.
Teatro Utile/Mascherenere offers its performers and its experience in intercultural work.
The research path will be divided into three stages.
The first one will be dedicated to the research on the cultural background of performers, dancers and actors of non-Italian cultural origin. A collection, through interviews and workshop sessions, of personal stories, traditional tales, images and visions, bodily memories. The narrative and iconographic materials collected in this way will be reworked into a textual, video and/or scenic dramaturgy, which will provide the backbone for the subsequent work with dancers and performers.
The second stage will be dedicated to the encounter between the bodies of the dancers and the projection of the video images resulting from the previous research. What happens when the scene is made up of immaterial elements, such as the projection of images and videos? What are the demands that this type of scene makes on the bodies that pass through and act on it? The physical scores will be aimed at the creation of collective or multiple bodies, so that they can become shaped screens capable of giving light to the appearance of imaginary beings born from the visions of the non-Italian participants.
The last stage of the workshop will involve a return in scenic or installation form during the Identity Focus and the creation of an online platform that will become a constantly updated archive of the research process. This platform will make it possible to strengthen the work at a distance, and will be the place where all the materials collected will converge, concretely increasing the possibilities of authorial participation.
Fedra Boscaro is a multi-disciplinary artist who has alchemically fused different languages and paths in her profile and research. After an initial journey into the visual arts (photography, design and lighting installation), she recognised the theatre scene as the natural place for her artistic research. After graduating from the Alessandra Galante Garrone School of Theatre in Bologna, in 2003 she attended Arnaldo Picchi’s permanent workshop at the DAMS in Bologna, where she also graduated with a thesis in Documentary Cinematography on Participatory Video. She continues part of her activities as an actress (including No-Signal of Teatrino Clandestino) and contemporary dancer (with Anna Albertarelli and Silvia Traversi, among others). In 2006, she founded a performance research group, Ipazia, creating the stage play La casa di Asterione (semi-finals of the Premio Scenario) and the series of multimedia and performance installations Cables#, which together will become the first chapter of the research programme Per un Novissimo Bestiario (2007-2021). Since 2010 he has been involved in the creation and management of Æliamedia, a project that won the first edition of the International Award for Participatory Art, promoted by the Legislative Assembly of the Emilia-Romagna Region.
Tommaso Arosio, after a degree at DAMS (Cinema) in Bologna and a long training in the field of theatre with Arnaldo Picchi, specialises as a video researcher, taking care of the creation of scenic images for shows, large cultural and commercial events, and also dealing with the technical set-up and programming. With the group H.Blumaverde, he devotes himself to the production of installations, performances and workshops dedicated to live video setting and interaction. In 2006 he is among the founders of Areaodeon association in Monza, dedicated to the production of public art initiatives, with which he collaborates since 2011 to the technical and artistic realization of the visual arts festival Kernel (architectural mapping section). Since 2007 he has been working as a freelancer, devoting himself mainly to the design and processing of scenic images, and collaborates with other authors and various promotion agencies.
for Arosio/Boscaro pic by Francesco Burlando
Silvia Girardi
concept, regia, drammaturgia Silvia Girardi
performers Sara Rosa Losilla, Carolina Cametti
selezione video Silvia Girardi, Laura Lamonea
videomapping Video Sound Art Festival
dramaturg Laura Tassi
sound design Michael Shiono
set design Daniele Girardi
sculture Dora Ayala
light design Stefano Mazzanti
contributi video ModoFilm, Daniele Girardi
assistente videomapping Alessandra Cassiano
urban ponchos Otto London
assistente regia Margherita Scalise
assistente tecnico Edoardo Verea
foto Luca Sironi
distribuzione terzo paesaggio
PRIMO STUDIO – UMANITÁ – LIBRO I travels through time and space in a magical landscape with a performative flavour, crossing oceans, galaxies and cities to explore the story of a Nature of which Man is a part. In the inability to penetrate it fully, Humanity Book I tries to understand the language through which Nature speaks and feels. It questions evolutionary intelligence, the planetary landscape, ecological threats and conscious individual action. It speaks with the imagined voice of Nature through life forms other than Man, who rarely appears in this account, no longer in his anthropocentric version of observer and dominator, but as the observed. In any case, Man does not know Nature’s point of view, so he must rely on dreams.
– Once man is freed from his presumed and inconsistent self-sufficiency, his profound interactions with the environment are coming to light. The crisis of anthropocentric self-referentiality has proceeded with the emergence of new, more complexly ecocentric instances. – Franco Brevini
Who’s on the scene > two Turritopsis Dohrnii or immortal jellyfish capable of transforming their cells from a mature state back to immaturity, in other words they never die. They have now mastered the evolutionary question and are over 500 million years old in our history since their appearance on the planet. Jelly A is tired of the continuous metamorphic cycle and dreams of evolving into another form; Jelly B experiences the omnipotence of immortality and the supremacy of the species. They have always had the same beckettsian speeches, until something changes their set-up, a strange black wave brings them very close to an unexpected end that they thought unlikely.
– Humanity’s ten-thousand-year-old experiment to adopt a way of life at the expense of nature is failing. A new worldview based on the planetary ecosphere shows us the way. – World Charter for Nature
The Process > Humanity Book I speaks to the audience in the form of a collage of words, videos, music and video art works. The narrative is not linear: it involves the intersection of real-life scenes, magical-realist characters, psychological landscapes, vox populi video interviews of contemporary humans. We use existing and original texts with an emphasis on the emotional and evocative component. Our dramaturgy comes from improvisations, stage writing, and physical compositions. We are inspired by Beckett’s synthesis, A. Kiefer’s painting, Magic Realism and technical-scientific language.
– The survival of the world depends on wildness. The wild is inside us, it is a dream we carry within us. – Thoureau
Special thanks to: Otto London, Mondo Yoga, Scuola Paolo Grassi, ATIR Ringhiera, Greepeace, Filippo Agnello, Ivan Casagrande Conti, Ferdinando Boero, Stefano Piraino, Federica Fabiani, Michele Di Giacomo, Allison DeLauer