RAFALES | MACHINE (CUNT) FIRE
dedicated to Splendid’s by Jean Genet
| direction Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò
with Silvia Calderoni (Jean), Ilenia Caleo (Rafale), Sylvia De Fanti (Bravo), Federica Fracassi (il Poliziotto), Ondina Quadri (Pierrot), Alexia Sarantopoulou (Riton), Emanuela Villagrossi (Scott), I-Chen Zuffellato (Bob) the voice on the radio Luca Scarlini and Daniela Nicolò production Elisa Bartolucci |
production Motus con Ert, Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
in collaboration with Biennale Teatro 2016, L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora Mondaino, Santarcangelo Festival Internazionale del Teatro in Piazza, Teatro Petrella Longiano |
Raffiche was born from the impossibility of restaging Jean Genet’s Splendid’s fourteen years after Motus’s “historical” performance, with a female-only cast. The rules of international copyright expect of theatre makers to respect the sex of characters, as they are indicated in the script. Even with an author like Genet who, for his whole life, fought for the necessity of metamorphosis, of betrayal and ambiguity. From this surprising denial exploded the desire to work on the themes of identity and revolt, of the refusal to adhere to a preconceived deference towards the separation of reality in male and female. An original script by Magdalena Barile and Luca Scarlini starts from the same narrative situation (a group of rebels besieged in a hotel – whose name remains from the original, only the name as a homage to the French playwright) to tell of mutating and subversive identities, creatures that have suspended the will to define themselves. Characters who have, for a long time, used performance as a form of political activism, and who now, in a situation of threat and constant persecution from powerful conservative lobbies, have moved on to another kind of struggle. They have taken up machine guns, without foregoing their natural elegance, to state “another” vision of society, without pre-established roles and heterocentral control. A show for hotel suites, that stages, really close to the audience, almost a touch away, the pungent and exciting breath of revolution, the sexy smells of transmodern witches. Not only are they back. They remain with us to sing a tune other than preconceptions, stereotypes and prohibition.
In memory of the Raffiche Queen: Damir Todorovic
CE N’EST QU’UN DÉBUT.
RAFFICHE was the opening performance of the special project HELLO STRANGER that the Municipality of Bologna dedicated to the 25th anniversary of Motus’s resistant artistic activity. This evocative (and provocative) path across various places connected to Motus witnessed, between October and December 2016, a whirwind of repertoire performances, conferences, films, installations and the release of the HELLO STRANGER book. This controversial performance premiered at the VIE Festival in Bologna (ERT) from October 18th to 22nd 2016. It is an “outlaw” homage to Jean Genet’s Splendid’s with an all female cast: a link with the past that, at the same time, reconfigures our own present. We have chosen Genet because, more than any other author, he is coherent with the dramaturgical line that overrode all of HELLO STRANGER, namely the reflexion on identity and its plastic transformations.
Photos
Press
RAFFICHE: download press review