Dystopia and utopia in art / Pillow dialogues / Alessandro Alfieri / Teatro.Persinsala.it

The future today seems to have lost any utopian impulse: no longer a promise, but a threat, no longer planning the new but catastrophe. On the other hand, the future has never existed, and it has always been the narrative and imaginative projection imbued with the present, its spiritual dynamics, an authentic catalyst of the tensions and anxieties that we find ourselves experiencing every day. As mass culture and the collective imagination have shown us several times for several years, today the future and dystopia are one and the same: as happened in other phases of modern culture, human responsibilities for the destruction of the planet and of one’s own species do not they can be rejected more.

On the other hand, there is nothing more anthropocentric than assuming even the demonic privilege of being responsible for the destruction of the planet: an often hypocritical vision which, by reversing the order of the elements, restores the glorious priority of the human being over destiny and order of the universe. The human being, man, in short, remains that animal that often gives itself too much importance. Whoever professes the end of the anthropocene starting from the inevitable rational argument, commits an evident conceptual short-circuit, but for art the discourse is different, because art inhabits aporias, adopts irrevocable dialectical paradoxes and polarities. In this hot, very hot, dystopian summer in Rome, Lacasadiargilla and the Teatro India have decided to build a one-week itinerary that crosses literature, philosophy, multimedia arts and above all theater around these thematic pivots. It is about If. Invasions (from) the future_New Era, where the “If” is not that of the title of the famous 1968 Linsday Anderson film that inspired a whole generation of students ready to rebel to regain possession of their future. None of this: the revolutionary and utopian impulse of 1968 was followed by a grim vision, theIf it has reversed the sign and proposes itself as a nightmare, as desperation, as the end of the countdown. As the Area X trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, who will be the protagonist in the upcoming evenings, the moment of annihilation becomes essential, also to draw on some acceptance understood as a ransom reached the extreme of dissolution; on the other hand, Walter Benjamin recalled, only in absolute desperation is it still permissible for us to hope. This is to say that to return to hope one must get to the bottom, at least from the visionary perspective of art: dystopia then, with an extreme blow of the kidneys, manages to return to utopia, because as Samuel Beckett himself and the philosopher Theodor W knew Adorno his reader and estimator, it is precisely the absolute gloom of the catastrophic tale that can bring out the unexpected desire for the new, for change, for the possibility that everything has not already ended like this.

On the evening of August 3, the installation in mapping by Alessandro Ferroni and Maddalena Parise on the facade of the India Theater introduced the spectators, announcing the dark colors of the dramatic melologist Birds. We said before about the paradoxes that have always constituted art; on the other hand, a science fiction theater appears as an oxymoron, because on the one hand we find the most ancient of the expressive modalities adopted by humanity, on the other the story of the future, in this case an undefined and determined future where birds they decide to attack, provoking a sort of human apocalypse which, in the post-war period in which Daphne Du Maurier’s story was written, was intended to be a metaphor for the nuclear threat. The solution adopted by the authors, in line with the audiovisual installation of the introduction, demonstrates how theater manages to overcome the divisions of genres and can even penetrate science fiction, because authentic sci-fi literature, including dystopian literature, always remains an investigation into the human psyche, the values ​​of society, the meaning of existence.

On this occasion, the authors have embarked on the path of the melologist: a series of voices that chase each other, retracing the salient stages of Du Maurier’s story, with the accompaniment of Fabio Perciballi’s electric guitar and Alessandro Ferroni’s disturbing electronic sound carpet. and characterized by low tones, cavernous, disturbing, often even impressionistic in the ability to return the distressing sounds to which the narrators refer. Du Maurier’s story became famous for the superlative transposition of the master Alfred Hitchcock, friend of the unjustly forgotten London writer and from whom Sir Alfred had also drawn for Rebecca, the first wife. In Hitchcock the dystopian dimension disappears, the anguish for the disaster translates as we know into a less didactic and more cryptic psychoanalytic journey. But on the other hand, the magnificence of Hitchcockian psychoanalysis has always done this: to sacrifice psychology for psychoanalysis. Here, on the other hand, returning to the original story, catastrophic and apocalyptic in a shameless sense, means returning to reflect on the meaning of man’s presence on the planet. Among the scenes that made the history of cinema and that particularly fascinated the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, there is an incredible shot in plongée which introduces one of the bird attacks on Bodega Bay: it is the subjective view of one of the birds, or perhaps the “flock”, or in a metaphysical and even more fascinating way, as Žižek maintains, of God himself enjoying the spectacle. It is a shift of vision that opens a chasm for reflection, which the melologue staged in India has re-proposed in another form: three of the narrating voices, unlike what happens in the story, are the voices of the birds themselves. Birds therefore, rather than expressing themselves as obscure and irrational forms of fate, are creatures that observe the suffering of humans and express awareness of their attacks and their ruthlessness, as well as emphasizing their regret for the dead of their species. The story in the first person is an operation that forces us to rethink the dominant position of the human being, it is in fact a brilliant expedient capable on the one hand of updating the story of 1952 according to the needs of the present, on the other of penetrating into the complication of the victim / executioner relationship, especially when the two agents involved are human and nature. And if hope is really only for those who no longer have hope, then paradoxically we can start from here to prevent the catastrophe from being definitive.

The show continues inside If. Invasions (from) the future_New Era * 2022
India Theater
Lungotevere Vittorio Gassman, 1 – Rome
3 – 4 August at 9.15 pm

Lacasdiargilla presents
Birds
from the story by Daphne Du Maurier
with Lorenzo Frediani, Tania Garribba, Fortunato Leccese, Anna Mallamaci, Stefano Scialanga, Camilla Semino Favro
electronics Alessandro Ferroni
electric guitar Fabio Perciballi