DECAMERON 2.0

_DECAMERON 2.0 _

The stories we tell ourselves to keep to living

What remained of Giovanni Boccaccio's _Decameron_ and the teeming new society from he recounted? Of the passions, intrigues, perversions and dissipations, deaths and mottos, great loves and miseries, noble hearts and cynical wiles, ballads and blasphemies, prayers and dung? In this once enchanting land, which has become global, and which has changed its appearance but not its spirit, it seems that basically everything has remained as it was; only updated to contemporary fortunes, like an uploaded program.

In the time of mouthy wandering, escaping from reality, the spirit is nourished and the senses explode. Today, in the time of expanded wanderings, on the threshold of the end of work, of reality we have lost control: it escapes us, hides, or seems not to have to care.

Addicted to daily deaths and eternal youth, we compete all against all in a virtual race oppressed by the mirages of success, abnegated to an arbitrary form of beauty.

As long as life, death, love, time and freedom matter little anymore.

The round trip seems to have been accomplished: Boccaccio's eschatological and initiatory conception is a trap that does not elevate but pulls us back into the loop: we tell ourselves what we need to go on, and by continuing to to tell, we build our phony homes, our fragile temporary dwellings. Today the children of the plague, having escaped death, surviving yet another crisis, aware that they have lost the faculty of free will, know that they are faced with only one choice: what to become or who to be.

The Decameron 2.0 goes beyond the narrative of the Boccaccio structure, the collection of novellas enclosed within a frame. The plague is the stark reality of our life, of history, the disease of being, of surviving. In some form it is also the death of the sacred, of the soul. We do not fight the plague, we evade it in dissimulation: by narrating desire, by creating a parallel narrative that does not tell the untold, but tells us about a mystifying refuge. Man seeks fulfillment in a dimension of nonreality. The territory of personal fulfillment is a virtual one, detached from the real needs of the individual as much as the community: Social success as mystification, sought or coerced, and plague, as failure, unspeakable.

The Decameron 2.0 overcomes this dramatic impasse by rediscovering the poetic dimension of Boccaccio'sopera , the one that speaks to our consciences.

Boccaccio writes the Decameron for women: they are the ones who, in the long at of idleness inflicted on them by male dominance, are prone to vagueness and depressions, and it is for them that Boccaccio writes with an intent to entertain. Let us start over from the passive aspect of the feminine, from desire from the rejection of reality, from vagueness, from indecision, from the emptiness of narrative in order to begin again to nourishing the spirit of man, to begin again to trusting non-secular dimensions and succeeding to making a collective plot emerge from within each one that represents the possibility of a collective narrative, realistic and virtuous, ecstatic and complex, free and liberating, a creator of visions and possibilities from to which a common contemporary epic can be reconstructed.

The Decameron 2.0 is a rambling, poetic hazard that mirrors from the narrative. What Boccaccio tells the women is a secular fable where the sacred lurks in human miseries, where the monstrum pervades and is generated in our everyday life. No magic, no imagination, rare happy endings, disillusionment. We restart from that sacred, as Giotto restarts from the color of the sky to tell us that the spirit is nourished by life.

Letizia Renzini

The rigid structure of the _Decameron _is dissolved into a new composition: the novellas and its characters, some of the plots, appear from time to time as stage happenings, images of memory, or in transposed, symbolic forms.

The original text (in English), written from Theodora Delavault, is composed largely in booklet form: it is the heart of our interpretation, the extradiegetic eye, the 'stream of consciousness' of the contemporary narrator. Instead, the confrontation with Boccaccio's language is entrusted to the actresses on video: Monica Piseddu and Monica Demuru.

We use as musical sources philological musical materials dating back to the 13th century (ballads, hunts, early madrigals) these materials are 'ruminated' and recomposed into the original musical writing of composer Yannis Kyriakides and guitarist Andy Moor, featured in the live performance and an integral part of the dramaturgical unfolding. Starring in two major arias is Belgian soprano Lore Binon, also on video. Interviews, video characters appear in our scene as well-known presences (Guido Cavalcanti, Federigo Degli Alberighi, Lisabetta from Messina, Cisti Fornaio), or contemporary transpositions of the events placed in the new multimedia context.

The plague is also our starting point, the abyss of contemporary consciousness. Horror in the body. No human bond holds any longer in the face of the fear of death. Human misery is laid to bare.

What is the wandering of women if not the product of their imaginative power? Outside the grids of verisimilitude narrative, the material is broken down into an 'expanded' iconography that starts from pre-Renaissance images (the illuminated codices, frescoes, altarpieces) and expands them with new visions and technologies: the live camera to emphasize the presences on stage, the 'social' videos that comment on the Boccaccio tale and transfigure the narrative: the reservoir of contemporaneity, the state of things.

Dance and gesture, also poetic viaticals, sublimate the meanings and accompany them: the bodies of the 4 dancers, as well as the literary bodies of the novellae, leave and find each other in and out to of patterns ready to deflagrate into characters, personifications, tales: the essence of the expanded corpus of the Decameron.