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HUMAN TOO HUMAN

Public Habitat 2022 > HUMAN TOO HUMAN

Human Too Human is the title of the theatre season that Lenz will organise from March to December 2022, consisting of a plurality of performance and cultural proposals, which will open the post-industrial spaces of Lenz Theatre to be enjoyed by the public..

Lenz Theatre has been the historic home of the company since 1989 and is located in Via Pasubio, Parma, in a former suburban and working-class neighbourhood that has undergone intense urban redevelopment in recent years. Here the traces of an industrial past, of which isolated sections of important archaeological value survive, coexist with innovative contemporary architectural experiments in a type of urban redevelopment with a European flavour.

Public project carried out in cooperation with national and local institutions and associations.

 

From beginning to beginning, in a circular time that is never identical, from Lenz to Lenz but out of the orbit already traced by years of research, of successes and arrhythmias of path, doubts and uncertainties but always unsatisfied by every result. Then the result presupposes a fresh start, new risks, new directions. New geosophies, new geographies of knowledge, new visions.

Today, the situation of the world, already catastrophic due to the continuous human attack, demands an alternative thought, of ways of survival, of maintenance of the human and non-human species. These are broad thoughts, but they concern the particular, they concern each one of us. They concern war and peace, because Nature can recover from itself, like the matsutake mushroom that sprouts on the devastated landscape of Hiroshima, or on the waste of Fukushima, or like the animals wandering around Chernobyl that seem to have learned to adapt to radiation, but for the human being the prospect is much worse, he is much weaker and defenceless.

Perhaps we need to go beyond the binomial Man-Nature and consider ourselves as all belonging to, and dependent on, the same Habitat. New bestiaries, new kinships.

What does theatre have to do with this? If the process of emotion, feeling and the brain are characteristic, like language, of the human being, every representation, expression and refraction of thought must necessarily have something to do with it.

Otherwise we would have to repeat endlessly the same way of dealing with ourselves, human actors and human spectators, pretending that everything is as it always was, that art has not been affected by the Anthropocene and its radical upheavals, that scientific research has not introduced new worlds and visions, new techniques, new creative practices, new relationships between agents and participants. It is precisely because theatre cannot exist without the two that it is necessary to stage the complexity of the world, the prospects for survival, new languages for saying, thinking and doing.

You will see from the programme proposals how the search for the unveiling of complexity is strongly pursued, tracked, spied upon. Apocalypse, at the end of the three-year period, means revelation, unveiling, and we still wonder if it has already happened or if it will happen and when.

This is what the theatre, as a corporeal and mortal art, should research, in parallel science and philosophy, anthropology and biology, sociology and psychology, technology and visual culture are already doing so at a frantic pace. Visual art, cinema, music and poetry have also done so in many works and are trying to keep up. Why shouldn’t contemporary theatre do so?

We think that, as always, an alternative thought, a vision of the world closer to a pantheistic conception of life and nature can come today from women, from a group of European and American women who for some decades have been offering us horizons and dimensions, refractions and diffractions that stimulate us to radically reconsider functions and perspectives. Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Anna Tsing, Nina Lykke, for example.

After Deleuze, Nancy and every rhizomatic offshoot of critical thought, these are our references today, our study interests, the imaginations of the future to be built in the knowledge that what really counts is only the present. Utopia and desire must be now, because there is no more time, the earth is tired of us and advises us to change, to revolt.

Lenz’s wide-ranging vision of the need for theatre, an encyclopaedic image, has been built up over our years of work, and has shaped our theatrical practice by making us discover beauty where it was not yet perceived, could not be perceived unless we went looking for it, with the same obstinacy as a Simone Weil, a Cristina Campo.

A continual linguistic, social and psychic storm, never resting on its own forms, always trespassing, even to the point of loss of sense, a continuous confrontation with unknown sensibilities and capacities, and as a compass Classicity that contains everything and repeats everything, never the same.

From Büchner’s Lenz to Catharina von Siena’s Lenz, we are still talking about madness and sanctity, but outside the initial time and drama lines, still building together for the next three years.

Lenz Foundation

9th March 2022

Francesco Pititto