IN-PLODERE DIsdemona. La Fabbrica del vero.
Da Otello e Othello a DISDEMONA
Imploding comes from the Latin, “in-“ prefix indicating movement inwards and “plodere” i.e. beating, beating, letting out by force.
Everything inside, as in a huge black hole of living, of predicting, of feeling in the body, in every part of the body before the mind.
DIsdemona implodes everything that has exploded in the actions, in the battles, in the tragedies of the great heroines who outlined her form, or simply of women, figures of females who have never been reconciled.
In Othello, both Shakespeare's and Verdi/Boito's all the dramatic and musical movement preludes the violent ending, from the beginning and during the Shakespearean plot there is the progressive flow towards that single outlet, the wave moves, slams and rises, as in the storm that shakes the returning ships, and the echo of the impetus is also felt, paradoxically, in the absence of the Venetian background that Boito does not choose.
The character of Desdemona is announced there, in the act that is missing from the libretto but that deciding, beyond all convenience as a daughter, is the foundation of every subsequent action, of every future premonition.
The protagonists seem to know what will happen, she and Othello and Iago in a plot fiction that
it envelops itself in his body, in his silences, in his presumed adherence to the fate of the evil star.
Only she will allow all that to happen, only she could have escaped from that imploding madness
and of feeling.
But it won't happen, it will be his choice to swallow the last star.
What form, then, should be given to this model, which could contain both the linguistic-musical innovation of Verdi's penultimate opera and the figure so similar to Shakespeare's Juliet and to so many other heroines who have gone through our works - Antigone, Hecuba, Helen, Iphigenia, Diotima, Margrete, Catharina von Siena, Dido, Angelica, Ermengarde, Lady Macbeth, Cordelia, Eurydice, Phoenix, Penthesilea, Juliet in fact.
Implode this powerful fresco of rebel forces into one body of actress? In a contemporary sign
does it contain the mass necessary to explode the dramaturgy? The action, the fact?
Maybe, again, in going back to the zero of Hölderlin, to the image it says of haiku, to the marked body,
to the noise of the factory and of the work that has always inhabited the place and thought of our actions, and again Simone Weil and her literary, poetic and political strength, in her imploding every pain in the world.
In a constant sound of rising waves and sewing machines.
Machines sew with a paroxysmal, violent, excited rhythm, the needle penetrates the fabric of the mind, the senses, the body. The words and gestures of the male figures of the work weave the texture of an enveloping, repetitive fabric, which layer upon layer beats the rhythm of power, of incessant work destined to produce the dramatic-musical chains, the assembly lines that lead things to always be things, always things.
For Disdemona is one thing for Othello and Iago, property and pretext, and it is one thing for the worker to the machine destined to produce. His figure was sewn like a veil (or large handkerchief imbued with magic), from needles and threads of a concertato of fiction, a one-way score of giving and taking, of distant irreconcilable perspectives, of views as adverse as his destiny.
We feel the same empathy, suffered in the field, as Simone Weil when she describes the workers in the factory, what they do and what they shouldn't do, whether they know what they are doing and what they shouldn't know, whether they are alone or all together, what disgusts them and what makes them proud. The staplers become real images
of a sentimental collective projection, a tragic and musical chorus.
Disdemona is an image of rupture, of a broken thing as it is made a thing, but a thing to lose for those who cannot stand their dramatic and true stature.
“Don't forget that SLEEP is the most necessary thing at work” Weil writes in point 8 of a list of ideal things for female workers.
Disdemona prefers to fall asleep, not die on stage, so that she can be able to resume work tomorrow, aware that in point 1 of that list on the ideal that does not yet exist it is written:
“That there was authority of MAN ALONE OVER THE THING and not OF MAN OVER MAN.”
This is Disdemona's only real kiss, over and over and over again.
Installation design DIsdemona
EMOTIONAL CONTACT ° SENTIMENTAL PICTORIAL ° STATIC OF PAIN ° PLASTIC ROOTING OF VIOLENCE
In the Factory, a new interpretative plan of Verdi's work is established: the violence emanating from the space of workers' work reduces to silence the body_voice of Desdemona (Dis-demona), mangled, suffocated by the roar of Otello_Jago's ‘polyphemic’ voice and by the obsessive sound of the industrial machines with sound on stage.
The rhetoric of the erotic-amorous paroxysmal act is replaced by the truth of the exploitative condition of working women, killed by work on the assembly line, crushed by the primacy of mechanical production over the dignity of human life.
Both dramaturgical functions are inserted into the figuration of the male/master - Othello and Jago – equally guilty of Desdemona's death and the violence suffered by Emilia, represented scenically by a plurality of female workers.
In the theatrical drawing of ‘Disdemona’ the moral responsibility for the violent act is not ‘divided’ between the powerful deceived and the subordinate deceiver, but reunified in a single sound source, the electronically transmuted (live) voice of a single two-headed performer, Othello_Jago, like Ortro, the large two-headed dog with a snake's tail from Greek mythology.
The space is divided into 2 parts by a wired tulle backdrop behind which the singer is in action in the double role of Otello/Jago.
His voice is amplified and electronically modified live by musician Andrea Azzali.
The space operated by Otello_Jago is in a bourgeois environment illuminated by a drop chandelier and a pair of style appliques in which a dormeuse in red velvet and gilded wood and a small dining table are placed.
Imagoturgical flows of a female macrobody object of the male/master/Othello/Jago's desires are projected onto the seabed.
The front space is occupied by an installation of 12 sewing machines and as many mattresses placed on the floor next to the workbenches, a space of psychophysical constraint that does not provide a distinction between work and private life, between fatigue and rest and denies women any intimacy.
The performers/Desdemona/Disdemona (1 singer and 1 actress) and 10 movers_workers act in this space.
Replacing the rhetoric of the ‘handkerchief’ is a system of large multiple sheets, shrouds seamlessly sewn and stitched by worker movers_ during the perfomative action.
Unlucky star
AH_NATIVE SPEAKER OF SENTIMENTAL MOVEMENT
I die innocent
She says of the vinegar density of the palpate ah, rope stretched in his arms,
when it shows itself it hurls unexpected sighs at fine hearing.
The good, the beautiful, the naive rises with parched breath.
Gallop cries, high-pitched voices and play wild words of smile and moan.
She knows nothing except the fatigue and evil of the final grip.
Lineage of tragedy, nature does not squander forces,
while God is scarce in help and broad in pain.
In ceremonial dress, he does not stand, but lies down to bear the brunt of the breathlessness
in the sunset of the noisy male.
Ah_for sharp eyelids that colorless tears keep generating.
Ah_for the sudden pangs and iron tremors in the heart of the lament queen.
Ah_because it disappears and vibrates, moistens, jolts in the mother tongue.
At the bottom, let her be a communist_wolf and not a Christian_lamb,
at least in the final strength of his Ah.
