The cumbersome adjective of “dystopian”, whether it alludes to a negative utopia or to an imaginary reality of the future perceivable in the present, seems to condemn Fahrenheit 451 to a destiny of failed prophecies than by the revolutionary Red Star by Aleksandr Bogdanov arrives at the 2001Odyssey by Kubrick. This does not seem to be the spirit with which the three creators of Sotterraneo approached the novel written by Ray Bradbury in 1953 (and in parallel with the film by François Truffaut which also belongs to another historical and cultural moment, and then Julie Christie though…) . At least this is not what the viewer can grasp Fire was the curethe latest creation of the Tuscan ensemble presented at the Fabbricone in Prato, conceived and directed by Sara Bonaventura, Claudio Cirri and Daniele Villa who also wrote the text.
IF REALLY If we wanted to find a verb form for the show, we would have to talk about the future perfect tense. That is, of a future that has already become the past, or is about to become so. Looking from a future time, and thinking about living it in the present. We are not far from the angel of Walter Benjamin’s history, who flies towards the future with his gaze turned to the past, which, not by chance, the previous creation of Sotterraneo had happily drawn from. Where, in short, the future is the means, but what interests us is the present. Here two temporal and linguistic levels continually overlap. There is the story of the show we are witnessing, a sort of surreal one making of; and there is the shift to the year 2051, the future anterior in which the same five performers, sitting in a row on chairs facing the spectators, take part in a somewhat clandestine meeting, answering questions that we can only imagine about the show a quarter of a century earlier. The atomic war happened, even if it is not certain that “we” won. Book burnings are no longer useful because no one reads them…
Daniel Villa
We play, even in a ferocious way, asking ourselves how close we are to the abyss. Theater allows us to simulate reality in order to analyze it The story proceeds in fits and starts, as is the style of Sotterraneo. They enter concentrated on the large volumes that they keep open to the first page, trying in vain to memorize it, in a vain attempt to become book-men themselves as the optimistic ending of the novel demands. They introduce the characters they play. Montag, reluctant fireman. His wife Mildred who spends her days attached to an interactive viewer, watching the dance of the white clowns. The young Clarisse who lives on the margins of legality, that is, she allows herself to think independently… The actions are first explained and then performed with the words of the novel or the sound of the film, in the Italian dubbing. The few productive resources put the colossal ideas they had in mind out of question. The simulated road accident to get the strange Clarisse out of the way becomes a flight in the arms of her companions – but we will find her in the end wrapped in bandages, before dying she asked to see the Dance by Matisse. And there is no shortage of images that add a pop tone, such as the dance of the firefighters in red overalls and full-face helmets, ending by circling the light column that transforms the jet of the flamethrower into a totem. Or the passage at the bottom of a SILENCE written in red neon.
Two slightly converging screens at the top project the captions that comment on the action in a dialectical manner. Thesis and antithesis, poem and antipoem. Today it is a priority to send a message / The artist is not a postman. The artist and his work coincide / The work is autonomous and its value is independent of who wrote it. And it is good that something insinuates the value of doubt, where dystopia only works on fatally preachy black and white.
ALSO MILDRED she convinced herself that she was trapped on her side in the role of a fifties American housewife, still relevant, seventy years later. While the songs on the soundtrack recall just as many books, she doesn’t run away. White rabbit of Jefferson Airplane in the sixties with Reverend Lewis Carroll’s Alice and so on. Mime on stage in a series of tableaux vivants in the style of the old Living that they, the boys of Sotterraneo, obviously did not know (and Flavia Comi, Davide Fasano, Fabio Mascagni, Radu Murarasu and Cristiana Tramparulo are good, once the first shock of not seeing any of the historical faces of the group). Play with fire says the song that accompanies the dance of the white clowns. They took possession of the scene, even our five actors had to adapt. Pure entertainment, but it is the only theater that remains. In 2051, of course.
