15.11.2011

MOTUS
Presents
THE PLOT IS THE REVOLUTION

by Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò

with Silvia Calderoni and Judith Malina (Living Theatre)
and the community to-come of “The Plot”

sound Andrea Comandini
stage space Enrico Casagrande, Daniela Nicolò, Damiano Bagli
lights Luigi Biondi  

a Motus production
with the collaboration of Thomas Walker, Cristina Valenti and Brad Burgess

Extraordinary Event created thanks to the support of:
Festival Santarcangelo 41
Morra Foundation, Naples





Is it still possible to imagine Brave New World as so many utopians have done in the past? Do mental and geographical spaces exist for presupposing and plotting an epoch-making overturning/overthrowing or, let’s say it, a real revolution, in our drowsing west? In a word, is revolution here and now still conceivable?

THE PLOT IS THE REVOLUTION is the Extraordinary Event that inaugurates “The Plot”, the new project Motus 2011 > 2068.

We have borrowed a term recurrent in science fiction and meteorology to describe the sequence of EE, or preludes, to the show “political animal”. Perhaps a process of no return has begun that will cast us into the hot spots of the planet to pick up telluric forces and accumulate the energies necessary for living “in a world to which we cannot adapt and which we cannot renounce, as citizens, as society-makers.”

What’s going to happen now? This is the question raised at the close of Alexis. A Greek Tragedy, our latest show. Alexandra Sarantopoulou declared that in her view the key to the answer lies in the words that some young people wrote on a wall in Athens: Ερχόμαστε από το μέλλον ( We come from the future). They set themselves in the future because they are the future, a future that Huxley and Orwell painted in grim shades; but might there be some surprises in store? 
 
Unlike the Romans, the Greeks were convinced that the tendency towards change, innate to the world of mortals precisely inasmuch as they are mortal, was irremediable and unalterable because in the final analysis it was based on the fact that the νέοι, the young, who were at the same time the new, constantly tended to undermine the stability of the status quo.                                                   
Hannah Arendt, Sulla rivoluzione [On Revolution], Einaudi Turin, 2006.

The Plot: a sequence of Public Actions/Happenings and Workshops (EE) for urban spaces and unexpected places. Amid utopias and dystopias, libertarian and catastrophic visions, Silvia Calderoni will from time to time involve various artists and freethinkers, actors young and old, kids, animals, bloggers, economists, scientists, philosophers and political refugees….
Judith Malina, our first extraordinary guest, will be joyfully opening this chain of “meetings with remarkable men and women” who have experienced or are experiencing epoch-making moments of political transformation. She supplied our title: the audience at Paradise Now  were given a map in the form of a diagram which represented the upward journey of the show towards Permanent Revolution. Written at the foot of the diagram were the words “THE PLOT IS THE REVOLUTION”. This occurred precisely in 1968, when really all the Living Theatre believed that when they left the venue the revolution would be put into action. And…  What’s going to happen now?

Now our utopian imagination has atrophied so much in the asphyxiating atmosphere of apocalyptic preaching (climatic catastrophe, lack of energy, extinction of animal species, economic decline, war over resources…) that it appears far easier to imagine a dying world than a better one. But it is just when utopia becomes unimaginable that it is necessary. This utopia isn’t a “Nowhere Land” or a flight; neither is it a universal system nor a perfect future, but it is something that affects us at gut level, reminding us that we don’t have to accept the crumbs of the present. There’s always an elsewhere to go to. Always.                                                                                                                    
Isabelle Fremeaux and John Jordan, Les Sentiers de l’Utopie, La Découverte, Paris, 2011

And we add that this elsewhere should also be imagined within the body of the theatre… Because if we stop building it, in the small spaces where it’s still allowed, we might as well close our eyes and sleep, unaware and steered forever, as if under towels on a beauty-farm, while the world runs by outside (and rushes headlong).

We’re putting on this “encounter between two Antigones” to share with spectators an occurrence or experiment, not a show but a fact, a dialogue between generations, experiences, voices and physicalities that are different but considerably close, united by the sound of the flame that leads us to still believe in theatre as possibility of action, of making a mark on the present time. We feel “disappointed but not resigned,” to quote once again the great Paul Goodman who described himself thus. And with courrage (doubling up the r) we are trying to exhume this word and bring it back to the centre of artistic activity as a necessity, and maybe as a real possibility.

Judith Malina is a piece of history, something she’s extraordinarily aware of though it bores her. And in her way she’s satisfied. What doesn’t satisfy her is that having become history she can’t start up a new mechanism of transformation. If only history could become fertiliser, or nourishment, or colour of the horizon, or slashes of light for the generations to come! If only she could call up from the depths of her undomesticated veins new insubordinations and new experiences of stepping outside experiences, outside the ruts of traditions!                                                                                                   
Cristina Valenti, Conversazioni con Judith Malina, Titivilus Edizioni, 2008

We are interested in the view of an artist and anarchist activist like Judith Malina, inveterate pacifist who has seen and experienced so much, on the facts and transformations of the here and now, repercussions of the winds of revolt that are blowing over the Mediterranean: in many cases they are violent, very violent protests and struggles for freedom: we shall also be reflecting on this.

These revolutions of today have at least one advantage: nothing will be as before,
neither within the countries nor abroad.                                                                                                                          
Tahar Ben Jelloun, La rivoluzione dei gelsomini [The Jasmine Revolution], Bompiani Milan, 2011