The Creation

GENESIS HOLY SCRIPTURES PARADISE LOST - HORIZON OF EVENTS

Was there a time, before time began?

The strong visual, almost cinematic impact of Haydn's Die Schopfung score, which between recitatives, arias, ensemble pieces and choirs leads to original orchestral explosions, the appearance of the first light, the precise description of Nature and animals, the poetic love duets of Adam and Eve until the final thanksgiving to God, all this linguistic Chaos, including Beethoven's powerful effects and Mozartian refinements makes Haydn's The Creation an utterly contemporary work. The figures - the Archangels, Adam and Eve - are bearers of countless linguistic stimuli. Moreover, the themes developed are still present, precisely because they are timeless, in contemporary art and culture.

Relating the limit of “human perspective”, the human dimension of time, and the latest scientific research on the origin of the Universe, or universes, as well as the appearance of the first man and woman on Earth is a dramaturgical topic of considerable interest and complexity. Like scientific and theological research, we think that artistic research can contribute to developing new horizons of knowledge and profound intellectual action both through the experience of the concrete act and through the setting of singing to music.

Crossing the biblical Genesis sequence to Adam and Eve while mirroring it in Milton's Paradise lost poetic alter ego with Satáno's gaze and strategy for the time to come becomes an accelerator of the dramatic dynamic - with his angels in the middle of hell, not in the center of the world because heaven and earth were not there yet, but in a place of darkness called Chaos - therefore a double chaos which, like two rotating black holes colliding in a cosmic duel of infinite power, gives rise to a rotating abyss as large as billions of suns.

To then stop time, zeroing it out along with space, on the event horizon.

A whirlwind of verses, repetitions, laments, linear and labyrinthine directions with only the instruments of the body, of music, of images. From free will to the sin of origin, Haydn's oratorio breaks down into a granular structure that projects itself into scenic space like fragments of atoms, pieces of stars and planets not yet composed, in a movement of sonic expansion like a cosmic wave that we still don't hear but that we begin to glimpse.

Creating is a verb that belongs to art, where everything is created from the void that contains everything, where every human act is hooked to thought and together they project infinite variables of meaning and long-distance relationships into the space of signs.

The only one ‘spacetime’, for the theatre, is the one that begins and ends with the time of representation, three-dimensional and geometrically corporeal. It can contain the appearances of other worlds as the origin of everything, through images and music as well as thoughts, feelings, refractions. The gravity that keeps the actors grounded counterbalances the ‘weightless’ words, movements, symbols.

The creation of everything, from the linear precipitation to that insignificant deviation of just one of the infinite atoms that changes things, the present and the future, implodes in a dramaturgy that attracts biblical legends, baroque poems, mathematical formulas in a sequence of events that has as its aim the demonstration of different possibilities, the freedom of error, the singularity of creating and recreating the world, from big bang to big bang, endlessly.

Gravity holds everything, even time implodes in everyone's memory, from now on until the first memory. It can be this reverse direction that leads the dramaturgical game, a text in reverse, from end to beginning, from now until the first almost imperceptible listening to a voice, a noise, a sound. From Adam and Eve sink to the point where it all begins, and from there to the unknowable irrelevant to science, at least for now.

And the verses fall, collide with other verses, images, actions, song and sound recreating a chaotic ensemble movement, imprisoned in the time of the ritual that recreates creation.

IMAGOTURGY OF CREATION

Francesco Pititto

The images report a time that implodes, like the angel looking at us falling backwards or falling upwards, like galaxies showing themselves as they once were billions of years ago, like a reversal of linearity that proceeds towards the appearance of the first face, from the chaos of the first day.

First the face, then an upside-down dawn that is already setting, the first filiform matter, the first plants, the first vertebrates, life that begins to fly, the creation of the first man and the first woman, the flight of the blessed angels and that of the fallen angels.

Then the return, the relapse into the amniotic fluid, inside a warm and nourishing belly of a maternal space that sucks everything in, reduces and concentrates. Up to that black point, always present in every macro or microcosm of falling atoms, in every vital moment, up to the incalculable dimension before the new beginning. Of new universes.

They are images already present, already born, among the million billion synapses of the brain, as among the similar billions of galaxies and stars of the universe, interconnected and rapid, overlapping blurry sequences that swallow the live action of song and word.

Crystal images inside a bubble of meaning, inside a beginning of all beginnings, like a contemporary Wellsian Rosebud of infinite memory.

The double transparent and semicircular veil of the scene houses the image, contains it and curves it as spacetime bends to the mass of bodies, in the four-dimensional scene where time fluctuates between a before and an after, and at the same time matter and image fluctuate between past and present.

The instant of the snapshot

The flash, the flash of light and then the matter in progress that comes out of its shell.

The chemical process, in action with light and temperature, causes the shape imprinted on the sensitive plane to grow, revealing it in a crescendo of crystalline pigments and a thermal process.

In an instant the light introduces the virtual, through the grid hole that tightens and directs access to it, the shapeless hidden in the dark magma of the revealing solution.

Instant of the instant, the real splits and reappears alchemical and unique, on the mirror of the virtual. The time previously imprisoned, smears itself on the paper plane together with the reagent, delays its end, and by dying out it causes the image to ascend from the real world.

Nail filing, stardust

These billions of billions of atoms are intergalactic matter, it comes from cosmic distances of thousands of light years and finally merged, reunited, compressed by its own gravity.

The stars are inside us, nitrogen in the DNA, calcium in the teeth, iron in the blood, the compact keratin of the nails.

The dust of the filed nail is human matter and cosmic matter, like the dust of bodies destined to close the circle of mortal time, dust to dust, dust of dust.

Isn't that the beginning, isn't that before the beginning?