I believe in Theater. Better: I believe in Theater as a blooming opportunity.

In the classical works as well as in the contemporary ones , as a 'declination'.

Jarry gives us back the moment of Theater even going beyond the nature of his own text.

It is not the words, nor the structure, or the texture, not even the drama itself what accompanies every scene, it is the spirit of freedom. It’s just as if the author wanted to convey this creative freedom, giving us Theatre and not literature.

I write “Jarry” but I think you can read it “Shakespeare”.

We have been working and keeping this constant reference, and all possible parallelisms. We have distilled them, chosen them, and evoked them, from Macbeth to Hamlet, from Romeo and Juliet or Julius Caesar to The Tempest.

We blent Jarry with his own model and Shakespeare with the inventor of pataphysic, we brought them back to our theatrical time, to our feelings, to our way of being in Theater.

Just like when you suddenly notice a detail you neglected before, like when you turn around with the feeling of being followed, giving in to the conscious enchantment of déjà vu, we wanted to believe that Pinocchio was there, in a corner of the stage, with the chain around Carmelo Bene’s neck. We have indulged in this feeling and we enjoyed the meeting of these characters out of time and out of any possible space.

The Ubu are alterations and skills at the same time. From their appearance on stage you can establish a point of no return. And then also of belonging, or new departure.

As we struggled to bring Theater back to life and reassemble all the nuances of the velvets of bourgeois Theater, Jarry was able to summon us and take us back to the Theater, offering us characters and a relationship between text and stage of absolute contemporary nature. Jarry brings forth a new, more than modern convention, rooted in the absoluteness that only classical works can determine.

Ubu opens the way to the Theatre of the twentieth Century, from Artaud to Leo de Berardinis.

I believe that what is staged is hardly able to keep pace with the changes that happen in the audience. I mean, the speed of transformation and evolution of the public, the degrees of communication and of any other relationship established between the show and the audience, are always a step farther than what generally the show is able to propose.

Jarry, along with few, very few others, managed instead to set up a meeting with us in the near future, moving the meeting place from the established convention to a possible relationship.

The pataphysics, or science of imaginary solutions, is a word that per se can be a synonymous of Theater.

Even the so-called Research Theatre has now its own "tradition".

This is pretty bleak, but that’s the way it is. It is worrying, but that’s the way it is. And it is a shame that it should be so.

There is a kind of conformism that comes, in my opinion, from a number of misunderstandings and that carries along on the stage a mode which is more shape that substance. I am here taking responsibility for what I write.

The first misunderstanding is the all-Italian distinction between experimentation and tradition, when actually the problem is the very existence of a show without theater that mortifies the courage of proposals and ideas.

The curtains should open showing the loftiness of a shared thought, an aspiration, but they are too often the frame of the sterile projection of representation, which on turn is lessened by the boastful and phoney richness of lulling in the consolation of self-conscious being on-stage.

Style and compromise are two categories who simply do not match.

Responsibility belongs now to everyone, without exception. I take at least one responsibility.

Inside these thoughts I present my proposal, which invites me to share as much as I can rather than to represent.

Theater is responsibility.

 

R. L.