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FUMO BLU
LA MAMA SPOLETO OPEN 2015
A glimpse into the lives of two 30-year-olds, grappling with impractical jobs and daily difficulties. To tell the story of our time, Blue Smoke weaves together the past and present of Paul and Claudia, who try to to make a living from journalism and dance but dream of greater stability at home and at work. Having grown up with great role models and ambitions, they now come up against reality and rethink their path. Managing to to understand more about their own nature. Interweaving dialogue and narrative, the text captures different moments in the lives of the two protagonists. Moments of levity alternate with moments of reflection, while the tragicomic experiences of everyday life give way to to a recurring dream. It sounds like a nightmare, but it has something pleasant and inviting about it, like the life Claudia and Paolo are immersed in. The two of them move in an evocative setting, while video projections taking shape on a large glass window help to suggest spaces and atmospheres, punctuated from by music and sounds that transport the characters and the audience through the times and places of the play. _Blue Smoke _developed thanks to an Artistic Residency project at La MaMa Umbria International with series of staged readings presented to Spoleto, Florence and New York (in English).
Blue Smoke is a dangerous state of pleasurable confusion. An imaginary fog that patinas the gaze and the spirit, hides the horizon and does not allow one to understand where one is going. It emerges in the predictable repetition of the everyday, familiar and reassuring. It slowly suffocates us, lulls us to sleep, disorients us.
Claudia, 35, Paul, just over 30. Two no-longer-young men who cannot to turn their lives around, nor their relationship, much less their work. Between ambitions, insecurities, frustrations, fears, dreams and disappointed opportunities, the day-to-day goes on with alienating inertia. Beautiful, fun and cheerful moments drown in uncertainty and gradual loss of meaning and feeling. A confused, ordinary, common life, to at times even comical. The problem is not the lack of awareness, but the mental inability to find, inside and outside oneself, the tools to effect change. As if that animal intuition that is triggered by opportunities or emergencies, that survival instinct that propelled evolution, has become hopelessly asleep or extinct.
There is nothing original about the story of these two characters. They are exactly like many not-so-young people of their generation. Exceptionality lies precisely in their normality, in being ordinary, in being the perfect example of a somewhat lost generation, born at the dawn of the digital age, globalized and all too liquid, as Baumann puts it. In this sense, Claudia and Paul become a portrait of society, and through them we can see reflections of the past, the present, and perhaps even the future.
Andrea Paciotto
_Blue Smoke _was born from the ashes of another text, Just Gone for Hong Kong. There was an entrepreneur there, who from as a child had suffered through the crisis of '73, and now, as an adult, found himself to facing that of 2012. There is little left of this story, but the underlying inquiry remains the same. I wanted to understand how the "crisis" interposes itself in a couple's story, how it enters the present of two "normal" people. Who are not two exemplary victims: they live comfortably, they work in the cultural world, they are somehow privileged. But that is precisely what interested me: to avoid extreme cases and to try to to tell the lives of many 30-year-olds today. to starting with instability. Which from work spreads to the emotional life, generating anxieties and insecurities, but which can also be synonymous with freedom, with the possibility of change. It has been rumored that in Chinese the ideogram for "crisis" is composed from two parts, meaning "danger" and "opportunity" respectively. Unfortunately, this is not true, but perhaps it is true that in the crisis these two aspects intersect. Facing the rocks, the two protagonists are forced to to reflect, to reconsider. Immersed in this situation, which is not without its pleasant and comforting aspects, they would risk going on by inertia, stifling an important part of themselves. Now, they will have to question choices made almost by accident, or because they were too externally conditioned. And perhaps build their own serenity. It depends from how they will respond to that phone that won't stop ringing.
Gherardo Vitali Rosati
by Gherardo Vitali Rosati
with
Daniele Bonaiuti
Silvia Frasson
directed by Andrea Paciotto
scenography Lorenzo Banci
Aurora Damanti costumes
lights Roberto Innocenti
assistant director, video and sound design Francesco Domenico D'Auria
assistant director lisa lim
English translation and subtitles Nerina Cocchi
production Teatro Metastasio Stabile della Toscana
premiere performance Prato, Teatro Magnolfi Nuovo, May 7, 2015
supported project - through an Artistic Residency - from La MaMa Umbria International (2013-14).
A theater critic for Corriere Fiorentino, local spine of Corriere della Sera, he collaborates with various publications in Italy, the United States, Canada, Russia and France. These include Theater Magazine, the Yale University theater magazine, La Règle du Jeu, directed from Bernard-Henry Lévy, and Liberté, the Montréal monthly magazine directed from Philippe Gendreau. For RAI 3, he edits the column Teatro Mondo, within TG3's theater program, Chi è di scena, by Moreno Cerquetelli, hosted from Rosanna Cancellieri. He received his Ph.D. in History of the Performing Arts from the University of Florence in 2011, with Prof. Siro Ferrone, after a master's degree from the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, with Prof. Georges Banu. He teaches courses in Theater History and Theater Criticism at the University of Florence and Calenzano Teatro Formazione, directed from Stefano Massini. He is co-author of Une Algérie 1830-1954, staged in France by Théâtre des Minuits (2007), and collaborator on the dramaturgy of Discovering Pasolini, staged at La Pergola by La MaMa Theatre in New York (2011). He curated the dramaturgy of The Medici Dynasty, a project by Giuseppe Arone on the history of Florence. Fumo Blu is the first opera signing from solo.
Born director to Spoleto. Began theater studies in Italy at the School of the University Theater Center in Perugia and the Pontedera Teatro Foundation. In 1990 he began his international experience, thanks to his meeting with Ellen Stewart, founder and artistic director of La MaMa theater in New York. After working for a few years as an actor, he decided to devote himself to directing. He continued his education to New York (City University of New York, Brooklyn College) and in Amsterdam (DasArts, Advance Research Center in Theatre and Dance, University of Amsterdam), specializing in the application of digital technologies in the field of theater. Throughout his career, he has collaborated with numerous theaters and festivals, presenting work in Italy, Holland, Germany, Austria, Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Switzerland, Poland, Macedonia, the United States, Mexico and Korea. In 2007 he was invited to the Venice Biennale, as part of the project Goldoni and the new theater, bringing to the stage an original reinterpretation of Servant of Two Masters, co-produced with the BITEF Belgrade International Festival and the National Theater in Uzice, Serbia. The following year (2008) at Mittelfest in Cividale del Friuli he presented Alla fine l'inizio, a show inspired to_ Le Cosmicomiche _ by Calvino. Since 2009 he has been in charge of the Italian translation and staging of texts by American playwright and director Israel Horovitz. With him he founded the Horovitz-Paciotto Company, which has produced several shows and published two collections of texts _Trilogy Horovitz _and Suite Horovitz, with the publishing house Editoria & Spettacolo. In the 2012-2013 season, the Teatro Stabile dell'Umbria produced the show Three Families, presented in several Italian theaters. He has taught courses and seminars on different aspects of the art of theater at La MaMa, the University Theater Center in Viterbo, Academy of Dramatic Art in Maastricht, National School of Dance in Mexico City, Belgrade University, National Theater in Belgrade, University of South Carolina, and others. He has been a member of the Training Committee of the International Theatre Institute (ITI-UNESCO) since 2009. Andrea Paciotto is currently director of La MaMa Umbria International Artistic Residency, based at to Spoleto and a lecturer at Seoul Institute of the Arts in Korea.
Active for theater, film and TV, she recently participated to Meraviglioso Boccaccio, by the Taviani brothers, in the role of Calandrino's wife, played from Kim Rossi Stuart. In theater, she worked with Massimo Castri in Quando si è qualcuno (2003), with Giorgio Albertazzi, produced by Teatro di Roma, and_ Ecuba_ (2006), staged for the National Institute of Ancient Drama in Syracuse. At the Teatro Metastasio Stabile della Toscana he starred in Frankestein (2009), by Stefano Massini, and L'isola dei Pappagalli, by Sto, directed by Aldo Tarabella. She has acted with masters such as Gabriele Vacis(Macbeth), Peter Stein(Tatjiana) and Gigi Dall'Aglio(The Children's Crusade). Also very active in narrative theater, she is currently staging Amore e ginnastica, specially written from Stefano Massini, who adapted the story by Edmondo De Amicis. She is the author and performer of narrative shows including St. Joan of the Imagination, Brendulo, When We Had Nothing (about Richard-Ginori) and The Black Queen (about Catherine de' Medici). With Daniele Bonaiuti she stars in In the Name of the Italian People, by Matteo Bacchini. She trained at the Paolo Grassi School of Dramatic Art in Milan, where she returned in 2014 to teach her method as an author and storyteller at the Summer School.