CAMERA D’ARIA

BECKETT & KAGEL & MAGRITTE

… Art rites for contemporary oneironauts

Franco Parenti Theatre, Blu Hall, Milan, 2024-2025 Season, October 6th- 7th

Festival Aperto | I Teatri, La Cavallerizza Theatre, Reggio Emilia, 2024-2025 Season, November 22nd

TRAILER: https://youtu.be/t9BCluwYjoA

Concept, dramaturgy and direction: Laura Faoro

Cast:

Laura Faoro, flutist and performer: the old musician / Winnie
Lara Guidetti (Sanpapié Dance Company), coreographer, dancer and mime: the dear soul
Lorenzo Pagliei, electroacoustic musician, sound engineering and live electronics

Duration: 60 min. without intermission

Festival Aperto | I Teatri – Reggio Emilia – La Cavallerizza Theatre, November 22nd, 2024

ABSTRACT

One night, perhaps her last. An elderly musician grapples with the routines of a lifetime, in a domestic microcosm of meticulous discipline and obsessive care for her instrument, transforming the very air of her breath into music. But the measured time of reality slips into the irrational time of dreams, a truer mirror of obsessions and taboos.

The musician begins her dream day anew in her Beckettian double – Winnie from “Happy Days” – a piper of clouds in a prison of illusions, as empty as inner tubes, grappling with her own ghost, a strange mime-dancer who seems to have stepped out of a Magritte painting. In the dreamlike space, time warps, sounds distort, and certainties crumble… is it better to stay, clinging to a mirage, or pull the plug?

Structured in concentric frames, the show intertwines music, dance, mime and acting, bringing the visual and sound worlds of Beckett, Kagel and Magritte into dialogue, in an unprecedented union between theatre of the absurd, instrumental theatre, Tanz Theater and surrealist painting.

In the outermost frame – the space of reality – the obsessive daily training of an elderly musician is brought to the stage by connecting two works similar in their dramaturgical context, the rare theatrical piece Atem (‘Breath’) by Mauricio Kagel and the equally rare video play Nacht und Traume by Samuel Beckett, inspired by the homonymous Lied by Franz Schubert.

But, falling asleep, the old musician sinks into a dreamlike journey that transforms her into her own surreal theatrical alter ego, Winnie from Happy Days. Thus, she begins her training again, this time with Beckett’s words, in an extremely uncomfortable “acting by playing” inside an absurd pile of inner tubes, ironic containers for the kilos of breath expended over the years pursuing happiness and love. However, she is no longer alone, but is accompanied by a strange character, that she calls “the dear soul,” a puppet with mime-like movements, comical and sinister, with whom she shares a mysterious, obsessive bond.

Beckett’s play Happy Days is thus reinterpreted in a dreamlike and surreal way, between black comedy and tragic irony, as a trigger to bring to light the true nature of the relationship between the musician and her dear soul. The innermost framework of the show thus proposes, through a universal archetype, a reflection on the “breathing” strategies each of us chooses to live; within how many piles of “inner tubes” we take refuge as an alibi or defense to combat the apnea of the void of meaning.

What are these inner tubes really for us? Are they physical spaces, people, memories?

By looking into the unconscious self of our dreams, as if into a surrealist calembour, it’s possible to discover it, because – in front of this secret mirror of obsessions and taboos – we can perhaps find a way to access our most unspeakable wounds. But only by confronting this rawest and most sincere reflection of ourselves, by putting our hands and body into it, can an authentic act of liberation occur, as a true acceptance of our existence.

GLI ARTISTI IN BREVE:

Laura Faoro is a flutist, performer and artistic researcher from Milan (Italy) specialized in contemporary repertoire; awarded two consecutive Stockhausen Prizes (2019 and 2022), and winner of the 2023 Donatella Giudici Culture Prize awarded by NoMus, she has a rich international musical and performance activity, spanning genres and languages. For ten years, she has been the creator of intermedia projects aimed at enhancing contemporary music in its interconnections with other performing arts, which have received various awards and recognition in both the musical and theatrical fields. www.laurafaoro.it

Lara Guidetti, studied competitive acrobatics and theater acting, specializing in dance theater. In 2006, she founded the Sanpapié Dance company, where she serves as artistic director, choreographer, and performer. She has choreographed 30 works and over 40 performances for the company, which have been presented throughout Europe, China, and Saudi Arabia. She is an associate artist of the MilanOltre festival. Alongside her work with Sanpapié, she works as a choreographer and performer in theater, dance, and music, collaborating with leading directors.

Lorenzo Pagliei is a composer (published by Ricordi), an electroacoustic musician, a pianist, and an orchestra conductor. Alongside written or acousmatic composition, he pursues multiple forms of collaboration with artists from other fields (dancers, sculptors, poets, directors, video artists) as a composer/performer of electroacoustic music. Since 2009, he has been a research composer at Ircam, where he invented the Geecos, electroacoustic instruments with which the performer can control the sound synthesis in real time through hand gestures on special lutherie-made wooden surfaces. www.lorenzopagliei.com