Linkiesta
Andrea Porcheddu
Lenz Rifrazioni: la ricerca del contemporaneo
What do we talk about when we talk about contemporary theatre? It seems like a Carverian title, or a doubt of Monsieur Lapalisse.
To want to dismiss the issue quickly, in two minutes, three words are enough: the theatre that is being built in our time. It's eight words, but less than two minutes.
But if you look closely, it's a trick question.
The other night I went to Parma. I hadn't been back for many years. The occasion was a double invitation from the Lenz Rifrazioni company. The group, known by all as Lenz, led by Maria Federica Maestri and Franscesco Pititto, has been an undisputed protagonist of Italian theatrical research for years. His language, often extreme, always conceptual, does not exclude comparison with harsh physicalities – what Romeo Castellucci called the “forgotten beauties” – that is, that broad, often marginal humanity that experiences the dynamics of diversity.
Lenz's research, in short, which has always been in that beautiful theater created with courage and dedication in an industrial warehouse, is deeply rooted in the tensions and contradictions of our time.
There were, therefore, two shows. The first is a monologue, entrusted to the excellent Sandra Soncini, which traverses the myth of Penthesilea in Kleist's compositional vertigo. A monologue inexorably delivered in front of the Mac screen, which multiplies and enlarges the close-up at the bottom. Penthesilea alone with herself, an unarmed queen, torments herself in chat: until she devours her own myth like a glass of water. It is a story that becomes delirium, obsession, self-dialogue of those who desperately search in the glare of the screen for traces of life, help, listening.
Then, a more complex and complex work, Aeneis in Italy, which sinks into the Aeneid like a knife, drawing from it a bitterly Italian essence, capable of uniting the legend of Rome's founding father with the armed struggle of the 1970s.
Lenz has done a long, multi-year journey through Virgil's work, divided into chapters corresponding to the books of the Aeneid, precisely to reflect on the founding myths of the “Fatherland” (the quotation marks, given the Italian situation, seem obligatory to me).
I saw the last chapters –from 7 to 12– entrusted to three naked bodies, veneered in white, two men and a woman. They play, fight, quarrel, clash, jump, dance, speak. They are shrill, amplified by the dark sound –elaborated live by Andrea Azzali– which makes the Aeneid a score of suffering, a mythical story that instead tells of bestiality, violence, oppression. In the eternal return of the equal of an Italian woman always devastated, gray, vulgar.
After the evocative and disturbing Hamlet in the enormous space of the Farnese Theatre, Lenz continues to reshuffle the cards of the classic and the myth, radically reforming the canon in the spirit of the contemporary.
That, then, is why I wondered what contemporary was and when contemporary theatre ceases to be such.
Can we say, trivially, that theatre is contemporary with itself, with its time? Here, doubt creeps in. Those who deal with contemporary art know that it ultimately has to do with the question of Time. Federico Ferrari remembers him very well, in the introduction to a nimble volume with the significant title of “Del contemporaneo“. Theatre seems to be contemporary almost by definition: how many times have we heard of hic et nunc, that is, of being present and alive precisely at the moment when two communities –that of the actors and that of the spectators– meet. The gaze, the body, the word are the connoting elements of that being present at the scenic event, which is therefore a shared time. But that does not solve the initial question. What is contemporary theatre and why it has to do with time. Ferrari remembers that we, we human species, are in time: we are born entering time and we die leaving it. It is, essentially, to paraphrase Malraux, the “human condition”. So much so that all philosophers –from Parmenides to Heidegger to Nieztsche to George Agamben– have questioned the founding question, what is time: the fulcrum of philosophical thought and therefore the fulcrum of artistic thought and practice. From this perspective – I summarize and make Ferrari's thoughts my own, I hope the author will forgive me – the “classics” sit on the edge of time, and wait for the fashions, trends, and frenzies of the moment to pass. They bear eternal values and canons – some would say archetypes –, which eternally return. On the other hand, however, contemporary art: the new that advances, that dives into time, and tells it, tireless in its changing, changing being.
Are they dichotomous forms? Conflictual? Yes, they often are. The classic loses sight of the real, certainly contemporary it ages immediately. But finally there is another way of being classical and contemporary: a way in which the ferment renews the classical and the classical confirms the ferment. Today we live in a time of accelerated theatre: in duration, in production, in enjoyment. Thomas Ostermeier, to whom we owe this definition, tells us well: it is a theatre that thrives on communicative and social acceleration and at the same time contributes to reflecting on the present time. Yet in this acceleration, the theatre has not lost sight of its relationship with Time. I like to take up, in this regard, a now famous definition by Agamben on the contemporary: «a contemporary is someone who does not actually coincide with his time nor adapt to his claims and is, therefore, in this sense, inactual. But precisely through this discard and this anachronism, he is more capable than others of perceiving and grasping time».
So, what is contemporary theatre. That theater “outside” of the present time for a small, slight phase shift. A point of view, a perspective, a narrative ability. Jean Luc Nancy tells us, in the same libretto cited, that contemporary works therefore not only force us to take that transversal gaze on ourselves and our time, but also push us, always again, to ask ourselves the incessant question of what contemporary is. That is, through our gaze – which is a curved gaze, which returns to us through the gaze of the actor – the contemporary imposes on us the question of what is the art, that is, the theatre, that we are experiencing, that is, what is the world, and the society that we are experiencing. With Lenz Rifrazioni, with other Italian companies and groups, this happens.