Biennale College Teatro
Site-specific Performance

This 51st Festival will continue to be a vibrant hotbed for creation in theatre and an essential guiding light, as an outpost of revolutionary wonders and heroic utopias, for the future generations of artists. With EMERALD GREEN – whose symbolic horizon is evocative of freedom, of the primarily civil regeneration of Man and places, a time of profound metamorphosis, the transition to a new phase of life following a harsh winter – we will celebrate a springtime reawakening for Theatre too, engaged more than ever in reopening the “home of the gods”, to stimulate the fantasy, the visionary outlook, the imagination of the spectator, currently smothered by the regime and snare of the social networks and digital technology.

Stefano Ricci  Gianni Forte

Stepping to the top of the podium to share the gold medal for the call of the third edition of Biennale College Teatro – Site-specific Performance 2023, unique in its specificity, are Morana Novosel from Croatia and Gaetano Palermo from Italy, chosen by the Artistic Directors Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte (ricci/forte) from the short list of ten finalists.
The two winning projects, produced by the Biennale Teatro, will rightfully become part of the programme of the 2023 Festival.

Fluid Horizons is the creation of Croatian performer Morana Novosel, winner of the 2023 Site-specific Performance call, and the lack of secure horizons seems to afflict the existence of the spectators as well, theirs, ours; a condition in which we seek to find shreds of meaning in the deflagration that has put a distance between us and the Other.

If it is true that happiness lies elsewhere, as Chekhov suggested, in the climate of misunderstandings and failings in today’s communication, Novosel revolutionises the premise of performance by engaging the spectator, at this point a prostrate user of aesthetics with the same attitude – passive, overwhelmed – imposed by streaming entertainment platforms, to take upon himself the role of director of a cultural reflection by becoming a performer himself, the audience, with a revealed force that is the close relative of a psychoanalytical process of awareness; an unfinished, rugged path, made fragile by human uncertainty and its hesitant attempts at direction.
Recorded voices, sound sources, shreds of notes, keys to press on the telephone: suggestions, fragments of a rudder to attempt to recompose the pieces of a puzzle that don’t fit together. Wars, pandemics, ignorance, and a cowardly lack of interest for what lies beyond our personal boundaries, have turned us into spectators attentive to an imposed form; Morana Novosel slaps us with her theatrical device that forces us into action.

The spectators, left in the limbo of a jumble of sources, observe one another in the action of appropriating other spectators; in this fossil riptide of literary hints, the speleological attitude of the audience conveys a pattern of meanings that expands depending on the aggregations dictated by the transhumance underway.
Novosel thus seems to be uninterested in storytelling in the well-known sense of the term, but in a synchronisation of events, like a mathematical formula that finds continuous reactions; the artist thus places us in an almost divine condition, choosing events and giving them meaning.

We have tried to govern the world, to act as the administrators of a superior divinity but we have failed; we watch unperturbed, unaware of the destruction we ourselves have incurred.
What is therefore an appropriate epitaph for a civilisation?
Novosel uses the city of Venice to mourn the loss of humanity; climate change, sea level rise, greenhouse gasses and global warming are dragging this humanity so serene in its deafness towards a renewed concept of Atlantis.

Perhaps Novosel’s encampment of communication devices will arise as an expanse of sunken treasure, to tell us what we had become, testifying to man’s future: the end of civilisation is not the end of the world; the loss of our communication habitat has turned us into distrustful molluscs. Morana Novosel’s performance restores the residual capacities we can throw back into the fray towards a human revolution.

Presenting an experimental fragment of his Swan project, Gaetano Palermo develops a personal score of signs, digs deep to reach the soul of things, radically eliminates the contribution of the word, catches glimpses of bitter fascination that bring sudden flashes to the surface and a feeling of imminent danger, through leaks of conscious images and other mysteriously fleeting ones, abstract elements, silences, private memories and fragments of reality, challenging the logic of time/space and like a mantra evoking the variations of an ebb and flow, allowing different languages to run parallel, allowing them to fan open to project us into the plural territories of art.

Freely inspired by The Dying Swan (1901) by Michel Fokine and in the typically fluctuating time of dreams, the director from Catania plunges us into the heart of the labyrinth of life with a rhapsodic performance in which the Heroine, skating on a day of sunlit iridescence, apparently isolated within the solo of her autistic bubble, hovers within a claustrophobic constellation of circular/elliptical trajectories. Following the explosion of a burst of unidentified pyrotechnical sounds, though her body is imperceptibly covered by a voluptuous scintillating “red satin”, the protagonist struggles and flails to feel that joy to the very end, persisting in pirouetting – again and again – to rid herself of the superstructures of reason, reveal her mythical originals, drink other flames and achieve the fateful leap over a cliff, into the unknown, in a disquietingly tragic finale.

The hopelessness, the search for a new sense of balance, the metaphysical silence, permanent fulcrum of a performative action, portray our current condition as “swans in exile” conscripted in a foreign sky, living morsels of flesh that, to save themselves, remain standing on their own strength, veering away from the pain and suffering to make life more bearable. Gaetano Palermo casts light on the dark side of the individual through the fear of the unfamiliar other and his solitude, disassociating the gaze of the spectator in the twin role of co-protagonist and voyeur. Leading them elsewhere, into dream worlds of desire and anxieties, he triggers an identification in them (which Karl Popper, alerting us, calls the tribal spirit) – that shifts from the personal level of the performer to the universal level of our community – thus allowing us to perceive against the light the shroud of an entire Planet, rotating around the axis of the Self like a drunken dervish, displaying a seething fury and paralysing brutality in all its political-ideological, social, religious, sexual, economic and environmental forms, increasingly stratified like unbreakable rocky sediment.