As Long as it lasts
Project
danced by Paola Lattanzi
Theatre / film / dance / interactive media
freely based on Italo Calvino Cosmicomics.
The performance premiered at the festival Welt in Basel, in Switzerland from the 14th to the 16th of August 2004. For the occasion it was presented in a multi-lingual version (Italian, English, German and French).
Crew
kills his wife (Elisabetta Spallaccia)
Concept and direction
Andrea Paciotto
Created in collaboration with
Roberto Andrioli (actor)
Lars Angeli (singer, actor)
Paola Lattanzi (dancer, choreographer)
Elisabetta Spallaccia (actress)
Jan Klug (composer, media artist/programmer)
Sander Trispel (media artist)
Francesca Maria Conti (assistant director, video operator)
Roberto Ippolito (media operator, technical assitant)
Gabriella Rocco (organization)
Co-production
OFFucina (Italy)
Festival Welt in Basel (Switzerland)
Project realized with the support of
La MaMa Umbria Intenational Spoleto
Grand Theatre Groningen (The Netherlands)
And with the support of
Italian Cultural Institutes of Zurig and Amsterdam
Review
BASELLANDSCHAFTLICHE ZEITUNG
Monday 16 August 2004
Light, sound, bodies and video.
WELT IN BASEL / The theater festival on the Kaserne area presented the debut performance “As long as it lasts” by Andrea Paciotto and his group from Spoleto. An impressive performance, a body-play, a video experiment.
By Joerg Jermann
Basel. The debut performance of Andrea Paciotto’s production lasts a full hour and is impressive, because it is a powerful exploration for a new theatrical language and to bring them across on stage. The meaning of the artwork is developed from Italo Calvino, who in the sixties wrote a collection of texts titled “Cosmicomics”. It was a time of growing belief in new technology. By means of Calvino, Paciotto now presents a different idea. He uses the contrast between science fiction and everyday life as the basis of the evening. At first one has the impression that he fills the space with technology, video and computers, electronic music, noise, rhythms. Light-changes dominate the set and the white dressed figures. This world permeates the evening, provides the frame, the function. In contrast stands the everyday world, the little things to be discovered in our smallness.
All that’s essential does not come from the information-machine.
The first image drastically shows what it is all about: a man and a woman embrace. Again and again she loosens her embrace; more and more he forces her to hold on. Both are lost in trying to find love or keep it. Next to the technology an ancient human drama is evolving, that has nothing to do with it. Only the insignificant is interesting.
The immense amount of information that is shuffled around nowadays proves itself to be unimportant, as debris. The small things that no one is informed about disappear, because we don’t know them or because we take them for granted.
Four people are in a car, video provides the street, video is the background, the four seem to be driving but they are not. They are been filmed, projected enlarged on the video screen, distorted, multiplied. In the back people are making out, one person is telling something about micro and macro-cosmos. The driver changes, falls asleep, there is an accident, the bodies spin in dance, lying on the floor in whirling lights. Time and space change. Linear structure hardly exists. Play, video, art, reality cannot be distinguished anymore. The observers observe the observers. Suddenly a woman appears slithering slowly out of her shirt, in a wondrous simplicity. It is about the old inner world to the outer world of the inner world. Four bodies trying to merge into one other in dance, as if each performer wants to realize itself into multiple video images.
Images of relationships next to love play.
The evening is poetic, a bit hermetical; the light flashes are arduous, as well as the base sound. The images of relationships stand next to love play, playfulness next to facts of death and technology. The reality is adjusted to be the voice of the memory: a horror scenario of the reality of reality. The final sentence brings us to the point: "To be or not to be is not the question, but to implode or explode".