THE ISLAND OF DOGS
The genesis of the Isle of Dogs is a complex stratification of dramaturgical "cores" and biographical explorations. The starting point, the original site of the excavation is certainly Eliot's Waste Land and the episode of the Cumaean Sibyl from the Aeneid, our next performance project. Two poetic universes very distant in time, but close in the idea of "visiting" the human geography of their time: Virgilian rhetoric and foundation of the new empire and Eliot's twentieth-century anti-rhetorical and destructive one. 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 better, from ours and from those of the five actresses, Sandra Soncini, Elena Sorbi, Valentina Barbarini, Barbara Voghera, Monica Bianchi, who create a mobile dramaturgical installation, sonora, corporeal, a sentimental anagram.
Our “Work” was to provide traces of never definitive writings, images were composed on these as the scene unfolded, the sense, the word, the music overlapped, it is an unsolved puzzle that continually changes.
The work conceived in five paintings, all feminine, is structured in a succession of autonomous dramaturgical and visual landscapes. On stage, five contemporary Sibyls superimpose the crisis and sterility of the West on the sentimental puzzle of their own existence, living their total solitude in the company of five dogs, only inhabitants of the Isle of Dogs, a wasteland on the edge of the big city (a peninsula that actually exists in the East End of London in the former commercial area of Docklands) from which they observe themselves and the residues of the world around them in dismay.
The Scenic Island is a hemicycle covered in desert sand surrounded by seven visual waves, 'liquid' planes crossed by large vertical images, fleeting visions of details of the natural and domestic world made abnormal by the filmic shot. At the center of the scenic vault the aimless flow of the elements is interrupted by a macro icon, depiction of the five sibyls, reverent to the Michelangelo classicism of the Sistine Chapel and at the same time of Beckettian derivation (Rocking) for that uninterrupted movement of the electric armchair in which the five women sit, self-propelled throne and the only plastic element present on the scene. A throne/altar for the body to be displayed in prophecy – a reclining machine that moves the elderly human, helpless, lying there looking at the existential waste that makes up the puzzle of his life – it is the place from which to announce the unanswered enigma of the present time. Like silent letters to decipher, The Icon Dogs are the guardians of the temple, motionless companions of the five talking bitches, coupling, reasoning and finally a real Dog, animated, friend and faithful beyond the intellect.
The five paintings are woven together by the electronic score developed by Andrea Azzali, historic collaborator of the company, which has built a timeless “sounding” 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, blow, regurgitations, rocky borborygmi, end products of a drying process, of dehydration of the sound frequencies of the voice.
