Beyond the threshold

Outside the door are the others. Yes, but for those outside the door, or behind other doors, we are the others. Beyond the hedge, beyond the border, are the neighbors, who take little to time to become cumbersome, dangerous, enemies. And we too, inside, or outside to knock to enter, are beyond a boundary. The gate, the hedge, the boundary, are multiplied in the plural: gates, hedges, borders, ports, tollgates, crossings, walls, hills, mountains, mountain ranges, rivers, horizon lines, curtains... And it is not necessarily the case that behind one of those crossings there is necessarily someone. If there is someone: what will they be like? Equal or different, friendly or threatening, cumbersome, annoying?

As always, Antonio Rezza and Flavia Mastrella's latest show, HỲBRIS, is ontological-humorous, delirious-realist, psychoanalytic-lunar and lunatic. Enclosed in a rectangle with sides only drawn in the ground and therefore always valiable, it suggests a refrigerated environment for the preservation of the species, equipped with some comfort for periods of long confinement, open to the infinities of abjection and laughter, of paradox and stratospheric and irrepressible acceleration, of torment and anthropological gaze.

Doors, doors, so many possible doors we see, made from a single door with its frame, light and mobile, which the cruel puppet, the Artaudian Petrolini Rezza displaces in space, figuring infinite interiors, where we close ourselves, protect ourselves, console ourselves, barricade ourselves, reassure ourselves, and as many infinite exteriors, where we disseminate ourselves, where we multiply life. "The door has lost its room and its meaning; it opens on nothing and closes on nothing," we read in one of the authors' writings. The door always makes us imagine other worlds; and once in a while we may as well slam it in someone's face to .

Shakespeare has the simpleton artisans in A Midsummer Night's Dream, intent to on preparing an unhinged theatrical opera for the rulers' wedding, say that the wall can be rendered with an actor painted white: he will open two fingers to signifying the hole through which the two ill-fated lovers Pyramus and Thisbe speak to each other. His entire theater consists of a few places, which gain meaning through the actors' words and spatial relationships.

Flavia Mastrella from always invents soft environments, of cloth, or of stronger materials, such as the edicolettes in Anelante, offering them as habitats for Antonio Rezza's stage life. He from time to time panders to those habitats or fights against them, deforming himself in the holes of the fabrics, wiggling and running between slides, wrapping himself in canvases to split himself - from one side, the other - to represent two figures in one or the two souls of a single figure.

Expressionist Cubism, with lots of theater of cruelty, with naive, wicked, cynical, sadistic voices and vocals, representing us as we are: ugly, dirty (despite the abuse of deodorants and perfumes), bad.

In HỲBRIS, anthropology dominates, in the exhilarating breakdown of parental relationships, in the bewilderment of friendship or family visits, of being outside or being inside, to the denial of presence, saying simply: you have not walked through the door and you are not there. "Opening the door on others' uncertainties, ambiguity, insecurity of being and pettiness of being. Whoever stands at a point dictates the law at that point," it reads further.

Rezza is surrounded from as many presences as ever: a chorus that often panders to him without words or with few words, representing the tendency, the need to obey to a pre-power. Rezza moves others with actions and words to cascade, making to stage companions uncomfortable, categorizing them, denying them, in a great amusement park or playground in which he, like a terrible child, a fierce childish tyrant representing humanity in nuce, manipulates everything, authorizing or denying, stimulating or restraining, until to making others lose their heads, speeding them up as in a comic silent movie.

But doors, we know, are not only those we see in our homes, in buildings, offices, cars, places of gathering or absence. There are those of the mind and others that project us into unknown dimensions, turning us into shadows. They can plunge us into many frightening beyonds, from which we do not know if we can return. There may also be a coffin on stage or a cage or we don't know what else: this show - long prepared and interrupted from an eviction from the place where Rezza and Mastrella traditionally rehearsed and then from that closed door that was pandemic - involves at the time of writing (early March) still a long process of work, before the debut to Spoleto.

The creations of these two figures, awarded the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale, have a gestation of years: and then they explode like devastating bombs, landmines, because they stage many miseries of our species, insane and tribal under hypermodern sequins. With Flavia Mastrella's habitats, seemingly simple but capable of creating with a metaphorical visual language endless possibilities, with Antonio Rezza's energetic, hyperkinetic and hyperverbal force, they draw worlds. They make us laugh and drag us into abysses where bewilderment can be molti- plication in obsessive, out-of-time, daily savage characters, as in that comic essay of human paleoanthropology that is Pitecus; it can be egotic concentration as in Io, mathematical delirium as in 7-14-21-28, existential and psychological bewilderment as in the broken one of Fratto_X; it can be a frantic race toward tra- guards never reachable and surely useless as in Anelante. It can become mobilized filmic ballet as in the shorts and features, most recently Samp, a killer against traditions in a videogame-colored Puglia, presented at the Venice Venice Venice Days. It can be provocation with the camera wielded like a weapon as in the interviews in Troppolitani or Milan, via Padova. It can become kaleidoscope of various broken selves as in the books, guided from titles such as So(N)no, Credo in un solo oblivion, Clamori al vento, La noia incarnita.

Beyond the doors that you will see opening and closing on various environments, so many from inducing a vertigo, from setting in motion the fear of change, from plunging you into a multiplicity that makes you fear the spread of nothingness, beyond the doors we glimpse a human sacrifice. It is that of all of us, at heart bourgeois in search of reassurance and distraction, and of the authors, the modeling artist and the marvelously cruel puppet, the de-liberating Pinocchio poet, the actor and performer together. The splendor of the body in motion, hindered but never tamed, humbly offers itself to our beastly eye, unleashing torrents of laughter that often mean that too much we recognize ourselves in that lamb brought to the mental slaughter and always pretend to delude ourselves that it narrates not of us but of those others who stand there, beyond the threshold.

Massimo Marino