Stanza Segreta is a thirteen-stage story that returns to Teatro Civico 14 after last year's success and opens the new 2019/2020 artistic season.
Saturday 05 October (20.00 pm) and Sunday 06 May (19.00 pm) Alessandra Asuni brings to the stage a performance born from the encounter with the story of Giuseppina Gonnella, a woman with magical and thaumaturgical powers who lived in Southern Italy in the 70s. The events related to the life of "aunt Peppina" Giuseppina Gonnella, have triggered in the Sardinian artist a series of memories that occurred in her childhood, linked to the dimension of the sacred, thus inspiring this latest work. The artist explores a condition familiar to her, that of being and not being, that of believing and not believing, a condition experienced in her ritual performances of the Trilogy of Rites (Accabbai, Matrici, Sabi).
"Listening - writes Alessandra Asuni in the director's notes to the show - to the story of Giuseppina Gonnella, "aunt Peppina", a woman with magical and thaumaturgical powers who lived in Serradarce in the 70s triggered the memory of a series of events that happened in my life, from childhood to today. Maybe it was because of her charisma, maybe it was because of her performance during the trance, I don't know, but I know that I recognized in her, in Giuseppina Gonnella, something that I had already met. The room in which the story takes place is the room of memory in which thoughts and images that no longer want to be secrets are kept. The room is an open notebook where the images appear as drawings, as memories, as messages".
Also on Sunday 06 October (17.00 pm) the in-depth appointments on theatre will resume, curated by Alessandro Toppi and Michele Di Donato who will introduce the focus on the work of Alessandra Asuni.
Note on the work and research of Alessandra Asuni:
Alessandra Asuni – in her artistic path – does not work for the mechanical nature of the theater. Rather, it is the organic dimension that emerges, that interests, that progressively strengthens. Reacting to the actions of her stage companions, deepening the inner search so that – only afterwards – a possible external form derives, becoming the authors of one's own presence. Art and craft, life and present time – the hic et nunc, this moment in which we work – intertwine like threads of the same fabric, becoming indistinguishable.
The attempt is therefore to generate human paths that are set within a theatrical perimeter, that have the theater as a means and a destination, that become a show without ever being reduced to being just a show. It is the process that counts, before its final formalization; it is the experience - both individual and collective - that is truly important: the work that is done day after day and that leads to the discovery of a hidden or unpredictable part of oneself, that leads to the knowledge of others, of a theme, of a text. Ritual - the ability to make this place where one experiences being together a magical elsewhere, where unpredictable words and images arise - and anthropological research, based on the intense bond maintained with the land of origin; the ability to analyze the dictation accompanying it and combining it in a visual score that respects the dramaturgy by betraying it, or rather translating it into a language intended to speak to the eyes of the beholder; care of the internal (actor/actor) and external (actor/spectator) relationship so that it is confirmed that theatre is – before being the organised production of a performance – a way to put man in contact with man.
Matrici (life) and Accabbai (death) speak of the ability to deal with absolute themes, starting from the flesh of a woman, from a few symbolic objects, from the narrowness of a space that must be shared and lived together. Performances that induce the audience to participate, making it – at the same time – a witness and an active agent, the boundary of the theatrical act (a human perimeter that surrounds and protects what is happening) and its essential element. A black dress, winter cloth trousers, bread, wine, salami, grass burned by the heat of a flame, the splash of water poured on the body, a liturgy of manual signs, the beating sound of the verb (Accabbai) speak of the material with which this ritual theatre is kneaded, which works with what the earth produces, with what distinguishes the atavistic or historicized identity of a people, of a community, of a long regional dynasty. The multisensory nature of the work is fundamental, so that smell, touch, taste, sight and hearing are simultaneously stimulated, producing an absolute participation, an involvement that rejects and cancels the static frontality of the theater. Matrici – with its operating table that becomes a place of reasoning and kneading – is instead a collective act, a production that calls to itself those who take part: water, salt, flour, mother yeast are mixed while – at the same time – everyone's stories are mixed: distant memories, old rumors, names that come back, my mother told me, I heard, it happened that, it was a summer day.
Parallel is the path of a codified theatricality, which starts from Lorca and returns to Lorca. The testimony, the legacy, the memory of the fathers in Mamma turns 70, the prison dimension of Il salto (in which the illiberal condition of a mother-mistress is already hidden, a suggestion perceptible in backlighting) and the recent La casa di Bernarda Alba – in which a back wall is a set of feminine fabrics, white and nocturnal; the rooms are boxes and the walls become habitable environments from which to spy – speak of the ability to deal with the classics or contemporary dramaturgy, the great or new scripts for the stage, the words of different authors. Apparitions arise from the pre-show darkness; lively and true bonds emerge between the characters; organic movements are performed by the actor or actress, filling the external envelope of the role with themselves. To put it in Lorca's own words: the soul extends over everything, giving forms the enchantment of our feelings. Together, because distinguishable only by those accustomed to classifying by genre or using labels, the long relationship with the Neapolitan women of the Forcella neighborhood: their voices that become theatrical history, their bodies that are shaped into visible metaphors, and the real - of a city, of a street, of a family nucleus - that becomes beyond the real through the invention of a language that prolongs life through its artistic transposition.
Antonio Neiwiller writes that the laboratory “has often been seen as the place where particular techniques are developed to create singular shows” and if this can be true and even acceptable, it is also true – and even more acceptable – that it is “the place of the mind and body” and a “way to reach one’s primary needs”. It is in the laboratory that “the vital conditions for research are created” and it is in the laboratory that one learns that “the ways, times and place must be found each time” with the same intensity – the same rigor, the same devotion, the same discipline – with which one searches for “the essential things for life”. I don’t think there are better words to define this experience.
INFO AND RESERVATIONS
Civic Theatre 14
Via F. Petrarca (Pine Park) c/o Spazio X
81100, Caserta
t. (+39) 0823 441399
info@teatrocivico14.it
www.teatrocivico14.org
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