Teatro delle Forme
Directed by Antonio Damasco
with Gianluigi Trovesi, Gianni Coscia, Antonio Damasco, Silvia Edera
A new art of project
The Teatro delle Forme, in collaboration with Roma Poesia, presents for the Two Areas Multidisciplinary Residence a new artistic production. The Teatro delle Forme projects have been very important to experiment and investigate a complex culture, where words, images, music and body interact in a work which wants to overcome the idea of contamination between music and theater, words and body, and to become an innovative rediscovery and re-proposed of a pre-bourgeois way to do theater, where scenic art was a fusion of knowledge and techniques to serve an unique poetry, and not the contrary.
Reaon for a meeting between Theater and Jazz
This new project matches together the Gianluigi Trovesi and Gianni Coscia’s musical mastery with the theatricality of Teatro delle Forme, for one of the darkest pages of Western history, the one about the Nazi phenomenon. The ones who have already attended the Compagnia can imagine that the point of view will be absolutely unconventional. It is difficult to imagine how this Theatre/Jazz and not-Jazz on stage had been not yet able to collaborate together, but it is easier if we consider the Kurt Weill’s work published in 2005 for ECM Records GmbH. By introducing their CD, their dear friend, Umberto Eco, writes: "When Gianni Coscia and Gianluigi Trovesi announced me that they would have done a CD devoted to Kurt Weill, I was very afraid for their musical health. I thought that Weill was not to be touched, especially if you were not a German from the Weimar Republic, you cannot play it in a smoky cabaret in the Berlin city between the Two Wars, you cannot be touched by Spartacus’ nostalgias and other heroic Brechtian frenzies. Kurt Weill, I thought, has to be shouted, but Coscia and Trovesi are not exaggerated “shouters”. They usually wander by whispering…[their] Weill lives in a musical drowsiness dominated by an almost oneiric contamination principle, mixed with other sources of inspiration, and he sometimes accepts to become an inhabitant from Po valley or from Monferrato... "; “ The problem is, this disc has a beginning and an end, even if usually this kind of drowsiness songs should be never-ending and be allowed to go on. Coscia and Trovesi would never end to throw their sly provocation and would always move where the listener is not waiting for them - but one of the two is always there, ready to throw back the counter-attack.".
The thought: "The nanality of Evil"
"The worst trouble in Eichmann-case was that there were many men like him and they were neither perverted nor sadistic, but were and still are simply and terribly… normal." Hannah Arendt (from "The banality of evil").
The work has its basis on Hannah Arendt’s philosophy and works about the "banality of evil". The author’s perception, after the Nazi boss Eichmann’s process, seems to be the same of any other ordinary man, characterized by its shallowness and mediocrity, which astonished her in the consideration of the bad actions he did , as he organized the deportation of millions of Jews in concentration camps. Arendt could see in Eichmann not only stupidity, but even something entirely negative: the inability to think. He was not the only person who seems to be normal, while the other bureaucrats appeared as monsters, but there was a solid group of perfectly " normal " men, whose actions were monstrous. Behind this " terrible normality " of the bureaucratic mass, which was able to commit the greatest atrocities the world had ever seen, Arendt develops the subject of the " banality of evil ". This "normality" means that some kinds of attitudes, which are usually repudiated by society - in this case, the Nazi programs - find expression in the ordinary citizen, who does not think to the content of the rules, but just applies them unconditionally. Eichmann brought the extreme danger of the “ not-reflectivity”. " From the Eichmann case, it is painfully clear that there were a lot of men like him and they were neither perverted nor sadistic, but were and still are simply and terribly… normal". And this normality is more frightening than all the worst atrocities, because it implies - as was told in Nuremberg - that this new kind of criminal, a real “ hostis humani generis”, who commits his crimes in circumstances which don’t allow him to realize or feel his evil actions.
