SUNDAY, 13th SEPTEMBER 2015 | 17.30 and 19.00 | max 50 spectators
BIBLIOTECA VALLICELLIANA
theatre
Within the frame of Focus Jelinek
Clouds. Home.
by Elfriede Jelinek
translation by Luigi Reitani
by and with Chiara Guidi
music by Daniele Roccato
played on the double-bass by the composer with the participation of Filippo Zimmermann
a Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and Festival Focus Jelinek production
www.raffaellosanzio.org
In Clouds. Home. words accumulate, strata upon strata, like bricks during the construction of a house. They are other people’s words, extracted from Hölderlin, Heidegger, Fichte, Kleist and letters of the RAF in 1973-1977; Jelinek takes these words, raising them and displacing them, moving them from the book in which they were found to her own book. She makes use of them, saying something different than anything that could be read into them, leaving them to be deciphered in an open way that cannot fall back on simply knowing where they came from. It is a difficult book to read. The principles of its composition are obscure and its phrases are dense with meaning but, extrapolated from their context, they do not point towards any explanation. We can listen but not understand, and while listening one seems to hear a subterranean voice, deep like the sound of a double-bass, that keeps the entire body of the work united. Jelinek makes her way through language as though she was entering a house and right there, provocatively, raises a hymn to the sacred German soil, insisting on that ‘us’ that comes back insistingly like a metronome, marking out the ebb and flow of history and humanity. Clouds.Home is a fable of power. We know its victims, and the horrors that followed from the atrocious emblem of ‘purity’, well before reading the book. History is known to us, a priori. And yet, in Jelinek’s book, that which we know takes the form of an enigma that is also a promise of change. In writing her book, Jelinek tears out the pages of a few other books and entrusts them to the rhythm of her composition. She also tears out part of the word that provides the title, and that originally indicated a “Land of plenty”: Wolkenkuckucksheim. She eliminates one part of it: kuckuck, that means cuckoo, while the first part and the last mean, respectively, clouds and home. While a Wolkenkuckucksheim is a realm of fantasy, clouds and home, without the cuckoo, do not harmonise and remain in a state of tension. Within this tension, a promise is awaited: the beauty of an ideal world that art searches for, both re-elaborating that which has actually happened and delivers this world to the concrete force of the present, through the disarticulated words and gestures of memory.
BIOGRAPHY
Chiara Guidi, along with Romeo and Claudia Castellucci, was one of the founders of Socìetas Raffello Sanzio in 1981. She was the soul of dramatic rhythm and vocal composition for the company’s productions, directing numerous plays and researching each actor’s spoken part. With the Socìetas Chiara Guidi produced plays which were performed all over the world at major international festivals and theatres. In 2013 Chiara Guidi received the prestigious UBU Award in Italy for the Màntica and Puerilia Festivals. In 2015 is appointed Artiste Associée at Théâtre Nouvelle Génération in Lyon (2015-2018).