Massimo Furlan / Numero23Prod.

Vidéos

https://player.vimeo.com/video/111412045

Sono qui per l’amore

Sono qui per l’amore

Project 2008, Massimo Furlan, NUMERO23Prod. (CH)
From the 17th to the 27th of April 2008, Théâtre de l’Arsenic, Lausanne

Situation

In a way, this project is inscribed as the final part of a cycle on the issue of love and the relation between men and women, launched with “(love story) Superman” (2005). In this creation, it was all about “telling” the fantastical projections of boys, dressed up as superheroes, on unattainable women princesses: children’s dream confronted to disillusion and failure. With “Les filles et les garcons” (2007), in a universe of teens and of rock, girls and boys frequent and confront each other, redefine and reinvent their role and identity, through violence and modesty.

In the piece “Sono qui per l’amore”, it is all about questioning once again the bond and the relationship of love, but in a more abstract form and with a wider range of iconographic references. To start somehow from a collective and archaic memory, working on the one hand on a repertory of defined cultural references and on the other from the interprets’ own experiences. Indeed, each project is born with and for the interpreter: that is to say, the choice of each « actor » is determining. The role has been created for them and by them: it consists almost strictly of what they are and of what they show.

Memory

This project was put together at the cross road of two revelations.

– In a never-ending car line, I was thinking about my two daughters, Lena and Lisa, and about what they had been living and the way they were apprehending life. I was listening to a song: “Sono qui per l’amore “ by Ligabue, an Italian rocker from the nineties. The conjunction of those two elements caused what songs of our life sometimes provoke: tearjerker.

– Lena and Lisa have been close to the interpreters Anne Delahaye and Sun-Hye Hur since the day they were born. One day, for the purpose of a game, they created a little show. It was astonishing to notice to what extent Lena and Lisa trusted Sun and Anne and to notice to what extent that what they had created was beautiful, abstract and yet so explicit and simple.
Images

It’s a girl story. And when it’s a girl story, there is a story about boys. It’s a love story.
On stage, there are young women, children. There is a boy. There are young women and there are women. Each one has her own story, unique. Some of them have just a short story, of some years; others already have a long story. The littles still wear pink; believe in fairies, in the prince. Their universe revolves around big Romanesque impulses and yet very abstracts. Real and fiction mix gleefully: an ongoing roundtrip. This vision of the childish world sprawls and contaminates the women and adults world who let themselves reach by the spatial and temporal distortion, this absence of limits. As if the core of this territory was borderless and horizonless.

Becoming

Through this work, we want to avoid, or at least to circle the issue of imitation, proper to theatre: neither are the little girls here to imitate the women, to act like a lady, nor the women to imitate the children. The interpreters don’t play a role. They simply are themselves, beings caught in a process of becoming and transformation. We are here closer to the performance insomuch as the interpret act on his own, without a trick, proposing an object proper to him.

Let’s forget the idea, ubiquitous since the 19th century – since Darwinism – of evolution: what we seek to point out on stage, through bringing together bodies from different generations, is a process without progression nor regression, un-linear and un-chronological. It’s not about level, maturation or aging, but about gathering and insisting on the strength of these different bodies who communicate, who create a common space. Thus, the suggested images introduce blur, strangeness: the ages ally, meet up, and move away.

Sono qui per l’amore

« Sono qui per l’amore, per le facce curiose che fa
Per la coda alla cassa, con il saldo più o meno a metà, per le gabbie di carta, per la chiave scordata in cantina, per il giro del sangue e per quello del vino.

Sono qui per l’amore, per difendere quello che so
per le rampe di lancio, e lo sporco che riga gli oblò
che nel lancio ci siamo, e la torre controllo lontana, con il brico sul fuoco e la fiamma puttana. (…)
Ligabue, « Sono qui per l’amore », 2005 in « Nome e Cognome »

Sono qui…

I am here: assertion of the being, of the subject, of the living. Those are 6 women and a boy affirming their being as a subject, all saying “I” at the same time. 7 bodies speaking at the first person, of the singular, and coping with the audience. They just state and assert the fact of being. They are on stage to do it. From that moment on the situation clashes. On stage, more often, the bodies in evidence are adults’ bodies, mostly between 20 and 50 years old. Those bodies are connected with the show and the performance universe. Here, it’s about something else, about gazing in a new way at the interprets, about proposing other physiques, other bodies and other faces. There are small girls, a boy in his early teens, young women and elderly women. The gaze is at the core of this piece: who is visible on stage? Those interprets, each one in his own name, assert for their presence on stage, the entitlement to be stared at.

Per…

for: the work also stands as a demand, as a manifest. A position is affirmed: “ I am here for”. I impose a face-to-face, I announce a “raison d’être”, the strength of desire. The formulation is quite simple, it declares a kind of obvious evidence, the question of love.

… l’amore

In this “for”, in this “being here for”; the desire is designated as engine, as impulse. Desire, love are forces putting individuals in motion, carrying and transforming them. On stage, how to represent love is brought into question. How to reveal its mechanisms and its conditions in this work? we take the decision to work from tales and stories, from iconographic (movie, painting) and musical representations.

Stories

The issue of narration and shape of the tale is essential in this project. They act at 2 levels : on the one hand, stories in series will be evoked, as small pictures (referenced to archaic narrative forms such as the folktale) and on the other, the composition mechanism of the story is interrogated : how can we tell a story on stage with pictures, sounds and quotes.

1. In fairy tales, in movies and in music we are looking for the way love is represented. We draw out a certain number of scenes, of references, of morceaux, to be gathered on stage. We try to detect how love is the great topic and great engine of the narration. How can there be a “Romantic lie” but as well a “Romanesque truth” of love (René Girard). Love acts like an essential structure in the narrative and the representation. Throughout the postures, the images quoted, the dialogues, the musics, we are erecting the material of the show.

2. With this project, we are going to tell a story, to write it, but it won’t be legible as such, instantly. It will reveal itself once all the images in series seen. The form is thus the one of a theatre of images in which the narration develops itself image after image, and in which the viewer has a crucial part: it’s him who assembles and constitutes the lead, who reconstructs a story, from evocations and scenes which have unreeled in front of his eyes. The work would like to provoke questions such as: how is a narration composed? what to tell ? what is my place in the story ? what does that I exist, that I am a determined subject, it’s that I can tell and that the others tell me. I find a place in a narration preceding me and whose course I modify. The story is my voice and my identity.

With the participation of :
Diane Decker, Louis Decker, Anne Delahaye, Karine Dubois, Lena Furlan, Lisa Furlan, Antoine Friderici, Massimo Furlan, Laura Gamboni, Sun-Hye Hur, Marie-Jeanne Otth, Philippe de Rham, Claire de Ribaupierre, Brian Tornay, Stéphane Vecchione.
(8 performers on stage)

Support:
La Loterie romande, l’Etat de Vaud, la Ville de Lausanne, Pro Helvetia – Fondation suisse pour la culture, la Banque Cantonale Vaudoise

Coproduction:
Théâtre de l’Arsenic, Lausanne; La Bâtie-Festival de Genève