Isle of Dogs

Agua | Burning | Match | Burial | Thunder

The genesis of Dog Island is a complex stratification of dramatic “core” and biographical explorations. The starting point, the origin site of the excavation is certainly Eliot's Wasteland and the Cumaean Sibyl episode of the Aeneid, our next performance project.

Two poetic universes very distant in time, but close in the idea of “visiting” the human geography of one's time: the Virgilian one is rhetorical and foundational of the new empire, while the twentieth-century one of Eliot is anti-rhetorical and destructive.

Of the classical epic only the shadow of the great tragic figure of the Sibyl remains and of Eliot only the mythical-allegorical carcass remains, largely replaced with enigmatic paintings that come from our artistic past. Or rather, from ours and those of the five actresses, Sandra Soncini, Elena Sorbi, Valentina Barbarini, Barbara Voghera, Monica Bianchi, who create a mobile, sonorous, corporeal dramatic installation, a sentimental anagram.

Introduction

Our “work” has been to provide traces of scriptures that are never definitive, on these images have been composed as the scene, the meaning, the words, the music have overlapped, it is a seamless puzzle that continually changes.

The work, conceived in five scenes, all in the female form, is structured in a succession of autonomous dramatic and visual landscapes. On stage, five contemporary Sibyls superimpose the crisis and sterility of the West on the sentimental puzzle of their existence, living their total solitude in the company of five dogs, the only inhabitants of the Isle of Dogs, a wasteland on the edge of the big city (a real peninsula in London's East End in the former Docklands shopping area) from which they are dismayed to observe themselves and the remnants of the world around them.

The scenic island is a hemicycle covered in desert sand surrounded by seven visual waves, planes ‘liquids’ crossed by large vertical images, fugitive visions of details of the natural and domestic world made abnormal by the film shot

At the centre of the stage vault, the purposeless flow of elements is interrupted by a macro-icon, a depiction of the five sibyls, reverent to Michelangelo's classicism of the Sistine Chapel and at the same time of Beckettian drift (Dondolo) due to that uninterrupted movement of the electric armchair in which the five women sit, a self-propelled throne and the only plastic element present on stage.

A throne/altar for the body to be displayed in prophecy – a reclining machine that moves the elderly, impotent human, stretched out to look at the existential waste that makes up the puzzle of his life – is the place from which to announce the unanswered enigma of the present time. Like silent letters to be deciphered, the Icon Dogs are the guardians of the temple, immobile companions of the five talking, copulating, reasoning bitches and finally a real Dog, animal, friend and faithful beyond the intellect.

The five scenes are woven from the electronic score developed by Andrea Azzali, a historic collaborator of the company, who built an “sounding” timeless habitat: a dialogue between the polyphonic compositions of Orlando di Lasso's “Prophetiae Sibyllarum” (1560) and the voices of the actresses broken down and fragmented into echoes and reverberations. Textual waves fade into a continuum of sound foams becoming vocal vapors, murmurs, regurgitations, rocky borborygms, terminal products of a drying process, of dehydration of the sound frequencies of the voice.

Burial

The Cumaean Sibyl of Burial (Sandra Soncini) lives in a cemetery of memories. Famous for its enigmatic oracles and infinite old age, it wishes it could finally die. But as nature blossoms again in the lying spring of the old, the fleshy, aging actress rediscovers the Faustian echo of love passion in the ecstasy of the erotic languor of a fiberglass Chihuahua.

Match

In Partita (Elena Sorbi), the protagonist is a young Sibyl who howls and hops between violence and desires; a Juliet suffering from anorexia amorosa: only body, only sex, without emotion or feeling. For this neurotic, lost sibyl, dogs are not faithful companions but sex toys consolers of her rainy afternoons, prophecies of lonely pleasures.

Burning

Burning is the short epic of Tiresias (Valentina Barbarini), a blind old prophet with the tits of a woman, wandering the streets of a city besieged by lawyers, bankers, garbage and panthegans. Accompanied by a faithful guide dog, it is a tragic parody of the Delphic prophecy of the incarnation: the old man of both sexes does not announce the immaculate conception of the Son of God, but impure loves vaped in alcohol and a death without resurrection.

Agua

The Sibyl of Agua (Barbara Voghera) drowned, her decomposing body floating inertly among the dry waves that bathe the shores of the Island of Dogs.

Like the Michelangelo Sibyl teetering on the small cubic pedestal, this plastic-bag-choked Ophelia appears as a dying whale beached in her stage chair.

Thunder

In Thunder, the final chapter of cynoturgy, it is the Sibyl of the Last Judgement (Monica Bianchi) who howls the last prophecy. Dehydrated and in pain from an incurable migraine, she is waiting for the purifying water, for that thundering Dies irae of the last trumpet that will gather souls before the throne of God. But this thin and melancholy Sibyl will not wait for the judgment of the avenging God, but will announce the coming of a man god, without hell and without heaven, reflected in the watery eyes of her dog.

Media

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