Massimo Furlan / Numero23Prod.

Vidéos

Palo Alto

A project by Massimo Furlan, NUMERO23Prod. (Switzerland)
Performed: 20th to 30th of April 2006, Arsenic, Lausanne

With Palo Alto, Massimo Furlan reinterprets freely several childhood memories and stages the different characters of his anecdotes: a singer for a variety show, circus artists, a serene and kind Madonna, a few feathered and spruced up dancers, a silent elderly couple… these figures confront their worlds in the space of a stage where bodies cross, brush against and observe each other. Between dream and failure, poetry and grotesque, phantasmagorical images form a story which echoes our own intimacy.

Image-memory:

“When my sister and I were children, we would go back to Italy for the holidays, meet again our cousins and immediately set to work; an important, crucial task awaited us: to conceive and produce what we called “il circo”, the circus. Taming of elephants, acrobatics, magic tricks, clowns, horses and dance. Before the public performance -that is in front of our grandparents – we would disappear for entire days. We were of course very occupied by the distribution of roles, since it was never easy to determine who would play the elephant (we had few volunteers) and who would play the tiger tamer (this frequently led to psychodrama).

With the material we found on location around us we would build a ring marked out by cushions, a few chairs as terraces and most of all we had a wonderful if volatile orchestra: the radio. Each act was accompanied by music that we would search for on the radio live: one of us was already a sort of DJ. Through this process we experimented with audacious crossovers: an acrobat act accompanied by the voice of radio news journalist (we had few channels at the time). I still remember the emotion before our first and only performance. The fear of missing ones act, to do the wrong sequence in front of our thin audience and then – once the show was over and our only two viewers had exited – the great joy of having produced an unforgettable moment of circus.”

“As all catholic children, my sister and I made our communion. We were ten, and it was at the catholic church of Morges. It is maybe there that, for the first time, I wore a costume for a real public: a big white robe with a cord as belt and a heavy cross. Our parents photographed us, and I found my self in a silver frame, on my mother’s bedside table. I found myself ridiculous: I had big black glasses and was carefully combed, which made me look more then good, silly. We were not alone on this bedside table, the Virgin -she too framed- had her kind eyes on us.”
Massimo Furlan

Description:

Palo Alto is a sequence of enigmatic and phantasmagoric visions. Its origin is not in a single story but in the intertwining of two memories: that of the circus world – of the child who attempts to draw attention, to perform his act, to disguise himself, who is overwhelmed by an exuberant joy -, and that of the presence of the image of the Virgin, serene and fascinating icon.

This series of images is presented in a linear form as a set of procedures which aim at producing a hypnotic effect. It is not so much about telling a story, then about proposing and slowly bringing the spectator into a contemplative state.

Underlying issues:

The work “Palo Alto” is based on the confrontation of several worlds, on the aesthetic shock in between images and sounds. The characters are set together into paradoxical situations, in which different representational systems interact:
The world of the circus, baroque, coloured, grotesque, childish and luminous; the world of the singer for a variety show; the world of the Madonna, sacred, mysterious, but also kitsch and stereotyped; and the world of the elderly, muffled, silent and motionless. At first, these worlds seem to be in complete opposition, but when confronted, relations emerge, new meanings are produced, and a system of communication is sketched. The last element relates to the title of the performance. Palo Alto, a Californian, high-tech and university city, is where the so-called Palo Alto School was created. This famous group of scholars specialized in psychology, sociology and anthropology was created by Gregory Bateson. Paul Watzlawick – one of the group’s main scholars – worked on the question of communication, of family ties and the double constraint.

With:
Philippe de Rham, Diane Decker, Francine Delacrétaz, Anne Delahaye, Karine Dubois, Julie Evard, Nicolas Frey, Antoine Friderici, Massimo Furlan, Laura Gamboni, Sophie Guyot, Sun-Hye Hur, Sissi Mader, Arantxa Martinez, Julie Monot, Claire de Ribaupierre, Joseph Roggo, Stéphane Vecchione.
(15 performers on stage)

With the support of:
La Loterie romande, l’Etat de Vaud, la Banque Cantonale Vaudoise

A co production with:
Théâtre de l’Arsenic, Lausanne