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Uffa che barba!
Quando noi morti ci risvegliamo
When We Dead Awaken is an Ibsen title, but the play we are going to do has nothing to do with Ibsen, or maybe it does and we don't know, because we haven't read Ibsen's play.
We stopped at the title, which we immediately thought was very good, almost as if the sequel could not be as good, and we did not want to risk it.
When we dead awaken, explosive title. A threat, a shuddering phrase, now you be quiet, but when we dead awaken, you will see....
Perhaps it is a sentence that makes the speaker tremble more than the receiver. Especially if you close it with a question mark. When do we dead people wake up?
A perfect question for a group of six boys in their early twenties.
Something has just ended, an era, a current, a way of doing and thinking has died.
Of course, the past is still around, you see the aftermath of it now and then, it clings to the emptiness that has opened up around it hoping to come back to fill it with its overbearingness.
What is announced, however, does not concern him.
Something has just ended and something new is about to begin.
It will be (must be!) completely new, a tidal wave, revolution!
Sta. for. it's that point there.
Of the dead before awakening. In that brief moment of pause between the end and a new beginning.
(Like the apostles at the last supper, the real last supper, the one after Jesus had died.
It's all gone, forever: now what do we make up? Father has gone away and left us with a sea of debt in the form of teachings. But what do we do now? Do we grow beards like him? Will that be enough?).
Loss, anticipation, feeling of omnipotence and total irrelevance, euphoria and early nostalgia, what was and what will be.
Waking up to twenty years and being doomed again to hope.
Touch to you. This is your time and place.
But then the time is never now and the place is still occupied.
Like the stage, on which the statues of three large hominids loom. Stone Age.
What do they want from us? Why don't they get out of the way? They shadow us. They are really threatening, and we who wanted to scare you! We feel small and ridiculous again.
Maybe we need to wait a little longer, occupy time in futile things, respect roles, conform to the clichés they have sewn on us, do what they expect from us to do.
Or destroy them. Sleep another five minutes or finally wake up?
But after all, if the ancestors still need some attention, to we are fine with it.
We leave them alone and look for a different space.
Besides, it's cocktail hour. So we are leaving, you guys do a little bit as you like.
WHEN WE DEAD PEOPLE AWAKEN
by Leonardo Manzan and Rocco Placidi
artistic supervision by Antonio Latella
directed by Leonardo Manzan
With Eva Cela, Pietro Giannini, Fabiola Leone, Irene Mantova, Riccardo Rampazzo, Daniele Valdemarin
scenes Giuseppe Stellato
costumes Graziella Pepe
sound design Franco Visioli
lights Simone De Angelis
assistant director Andrea Lucchetta
INFORMATION
The show includes nude scenes
"Ugh, what a beard! Oof, what a bore!"
With this phrase the episodes of Casa Vianello, the TV sit-com starring Sandra Mondaini and Raimondo Vianello, ended; after a day peppered from with rocambolic episodes, misunderstandings, and comical quarrels, the couple wished each other good night with this phrase uttered by Mondaini, which became almost a slogan capable of entering the jargon of Italians. A phrase we now naturally associate to with something boring, repetitive; kids often use it when called upon by adults to to do something they would not like to do, such as studying. For adults, perhaps, it has instead become a kind of sentence from applied to politics, when it keeps to re-proposing to us the same scenario as always without any novelty or even hope. It is a funny phrase that helps us to downplay, to sometimes, the miseries of life, the nonsense of everyday life.
It is possible that continuing studies after a three-year academy, extending them for two more years, could be a path from dismissed with a peremptory "Ugh, what a beard!" Yet the sought-after, chosen and desired study, which further enhances our knowledge base, can truly prepare us for the test of work. Titling a two-year term "Ugh, what a beard!" is not meant to be a provocation, but a theme on which to orient two years of study, comparison and verification; two years dedicated to the theme of "beard" declined in all its variants: boredom, of course, but also the endless beards that populate theatrical or literary texts, fairy tales, the beards of real-life characters or those of the protagonists of the seventh art. An ironic phrase, then, that can accompany us by offering the possibility of investigating multiple languages and multiple worlds of artistic expression.
Antonio Latella
A director, playwright and pedagogue of European renown, he has lived to Berlin since 2004. He studied acting at the Teatro Stabile school in Turin directed from Franco Passatore and the Bottega Teatrale in Florence founded from Vittorio Gassman. But it is his work as a director, which he began in 1998, to give him national and European fame, taking his shows to the top theaters and international festivals. His career from director gives him countless awards including: in 2001 the Ubu Award for the Shakespeare Project and Beyond; in 2005 the National Award of the Association of Theatre Critics for La cena de le ceneri, best play of the year; in 2007 the Ubu Award for Studio su Medea best play of the year; in 2012 the Hystrio Award for directing; also in 2012 the Ubu Award for best direction for Un streetcar che si chiama desiderio; in 2013 the Ubu Prize for best direction with Francamente me ne infischio; in 2014 he is a finalist for the Nestroy Prize in Vienna for Die Wohlgesinnten; in 2015 he wins the Premio le Maschere del Teatro for Natale in casa Cupiello; in 2016 the Ubu Prize for Santa Estasi, best play of the year; in 2019 the Ubu Prize for Aminta; in 2021 the Ubu Prize for Hamlet, play of the year. He is the first Italian-trained director and author to be selected for the Berliner Festspiele's Theatertreffen, selection of the ten best German-language shows in 2020. In 2011 he founded his company "stabilemobile." The Venice Biennale chaired from Paolo Baratta appointed him director of the Theater sector for the four-year period 2017/2020. Since 2010, he has been a lecturer and pedagogue at the most important Italian Theater Schools: the Accademia d'Arte Drammatica Silvio d'Amico in Rome, Teatro Stabile in Turin, Piccolo Teatro in Milan, and Scuola Civica Paolo Grassi in Milan.
Leonardo Manzan, class of 1992, graduated as an actor from the Civica Scuola di Arte Drammatica Paolo Grassi in Milan.
He made his directorial debut with the show It's App to You - or solipsism: a show, in the guise of a video game, about virtual reality that won numerous awards, including InBox 2018.
He won, also in 2018, the Venice Biennale's call for directors Under 30 with the show-concert Cyrano must die. A rewriting in rap verse of Rostand's famous drama.
Invited again to the Theatre Biennale, in 2020 he presented the show Glory Wall, which won the Best Play award, and was his personal interpretation of the Festival's theme: censorship. A 12-meter wall separates the stage from the audience and comes alive with dreamlike visions that mercilessly reflect on the theme of censorship and the now nonexistent power of art.
In his latest work titled A Performance of Leonardo Manzan transforms the theater into a museum hall and welcomes the audience standing on a pedestal. "I am an 'opera of art!" he tells the audience, who will be able to follow the performance through radio guides that are used in museums.
Antonio Latella
Silvio d'Amico National Academy of Dramatic Art
Ouch what a beard!
Ouch what a beard!
Ouch what a beard!
Leonardo Lidi
Alessandro Baricco
Antonio Latella
Isabelle Adjani
