Bestie di scena (Stage beasts)

By Emma Dante

Production Compagnia Sud Costa Occidentale

Piccolo Teatro di Milano - Festival d’Avignon   

For a long time now Emma Dante's language has been made up of dialects, gestures, and accents. It is a southern language, trivial and popular, which the Sicilian director ennobled with metaphors and pushed to its limits within surrealist situations. Words, bodies, and rhythms which highlight, not without imagination, the brutality of the human comedy and which stand up to remind us of the social and political engagement of a community, whether a family or the community of the theatre. With Bestie di scena (Stage Beasts), Emma Dante continues her quest for honesty. No text, no set, no costumes, no music. But actors. Actors left to their own devices, actors up to the challenge. From backstage, objects, clothes, words come flying at them in unexpected ways. Forced to survive just as the group falls apart, they start transforming over and over again: into animals, children, idiots... For Emma Dante, who creates here a true poetic art in her quest for “the juice of drunkenness and torment,” actors are on the frontline of this attempt to break down the conventions of theatre. We are all those “imbeciles, without structure and without mask, facing the tragedies of the modern world.”

Source: www.festival-avignon.com