Interview by STEFANO RICCI & GIANNI FORTE
Portrait by Angelo Cricchi
Paris, April 25th, 2015
Stefano. How much do you like interviews? Gianni. Ah, do we start this way?! It depends from who makes them. I don’t usually feel comfortable, with that “I know everything” behaviour and “let’s see what you answer me” headed for me by the interviewers. With you, contrarily, I feel as if I wore a climbing equipment… The comparison starts and we both know that we will climb up for a wider vision. If the questions set some questions to open a debate on the intents, when is not contaminated with the gossip or the game of the tower, then I can speak of thirst of knowledge, sharing, exchange. The same routs I try to plot while I work. The source of mystery, joy and frustration that governs the hands of my hours it is, no doubt, more interesting than whatever stance previously taken. We are not cuckoo swiss clocks. The devices are made of meat, blood, feelings, passions.
Gianni. The main feature of your character?
Stefano. Didn’t we say “no promotional messages”?! Apart from the easy solipsism, I believe that the non-stop exploration and the obstinate stubbornness in not being satisfied took the upper hand over my growth. The moral and ethics laws I created inside of me keep on sustaining a Personal Senate of strict awareness. The low-heat pride, the sealings against the coarse approximation, the fallen stubbornness 24 hours a day are the companions that accept a drink only from other globetrotters with the same impatience. It is what mantains, after so many years, though, our exchanged looks.
Gianni. What scares you? And do you do “theater” for the fear of anything?
Stefano. When I was a child the fear was represented by the Dark. I lost my certainties as soon as the lights started to diminish on the known perimeters. Today, being an adult, it is the dawn that produces discomfort, showing the clean contours of an antiseptic and formal Contemporary. The dawn is a slap that strikes the sensibilities and the detonating power of the imagination. With the obscurity I lose the contours and I can complete this journey into other universes, as that of the Imagination, constant protagonist of my existence, redrawing the Reality, stimulating the intellect and the senses altogether. As a “miner of the soul” I build with you these poetic architectures where we can take a breath finding an escape to the bolus of days and conformed habits.
Stefano. Life of a dreamer, as an intellectual, as a minstrel, as a white heart, as an enthusiastic of the Verb. All these souls cohabiting in you how do they cope with our Reality? Yours, ours “doing theater” has it a meaning nowadays?
Gianni. Why asking us if our “doing theater” has a meaning when life doesn’t have it? What is Art today? What are the merciless mechanisms when we produce an imaginary that can reawaken us from the sleep of the Goya? In a period of cultural obscurantism, of hegemony of the communication, to cut the drawstring that ties us with a double knot to the product we have to deliver, to succeed in surprising us with the solitary will to create reflections through an aesthetical primer in perpetual regeneration, it is the only luxury that I can afford. The storm of questions that I put on during the elaboration of a project, becomes, later, a dialogue with the audience. This exposition in first person in front of a social apparatus, it is the knot of the marketing. The artist, however, before becoming product, he is coherence with the inner self.
Gianni. What gift of nature would you like to have?
Stefano. Patience and the snow rackets to stay with burning ankles and neurons.
Gianni. Our history is about nomadism and continuous landings. Is it a forced stage for the creation?
Stefano. We need to get out of the highways and venture on the state highway and on the paths in the wood if want to meet an unexpected perspective. The push upward to go out of the usual borders, is an essential cross. Ulysses is punished for his greed of knowledge, for his nausea of curiosity that pushes him to search further. Have we chosen this fatal work or has it taken possession of our imprints? It is sure that the continuous self-generating, the nonstop motion that has accompanied our bodies through the more diverse artistic strengths is a sign of a will – being men before as being artists – to know the planet we live in and the possibility to decipher it through our experience.Stefano. Is the Sacred Fire an illness or a vocation?
Gianni. It is like entering an elevator that, instead of going up, it falls down: a sentence, a particular grace, a trusted friend, a playmate with an inexhaustible vitality. A virtue, a super power, being without a leg and with a wing in excess.
Gianni. Is the live show world therefore a self-powered corruption?
Stefano. The corruption would not be so flaming if it was not accompanied by the bleakness of the nonsense. The fragility of this period, so deproved of cultural innovation, produces an incurable cancer favoring the need of certainties and personal consents that conduct to the frozed food sold in our theaters. The platoon of the ignorant and non-talented operators thickens its lines every day. The glamourization of the show has by now started and it will be difficult to oppose to these living deads that continue to enchant a defeated public with charming plot and virtuos intonations. The Theater is not and will never be a cowboys film.
Stefano. To whom would you turn to ask suggestions in a difficult moment?
Gianni. To myself. A garden of the Esperidis that I never get tired of cultivating. A dynamo that emits some shines especially in the scratches that the path has reserved us. A thermal shield against the noise and the sensation of a contemporary drifting.
Stefano. Speaking of clamors, we are amiss labeled as provocative, transgressive artists. Is it appropriate to use the word “scandal” in the art?
Gianni. The liberty of language is never demonstration of something but affirmation of a personal imprint on things. Who thinks strictly about his/her own limits, who judges an expressive sing as provocative, this person is reporting a problem, it is not the artist who expresses himself through this alphabet. Nothing is free or scandalous if consistent with its journey. TVransgression not as a cliché to break all the rules or schemes putting them among parenthesis but a concrete possibility that is offered to us to establish a very intimate conversation, private, between me, you, our performers and the people who approach to us, who graze us in that precise moment…
Stefano. Your first memory?
Gianni. A curtain, a batik tent, a pair of moccasins, an armchair of vinyl, me piercing everything with a sigar lighter on the notes of the Earth, Wind & Fire. Apart this ancestral divination, the first memory to be hammered in my bark will be that of tomorrow when I wake up. To keep on creating memoirs, always, to purchase other lotteries of ground to build file upgrades. The next memoirs, to realize as garlands, will be soaked with spotted feline, uncomfortable literates and contested ones, new innovative adventures roped together, French and Italian as the Biondo Theater in Palermo, with whom we will do a show on Sicily freely inspired to the Gattopardo, and the CSS of Udine and the Festival delle Colline Torinesi, with them – with the Last Inventory Before Liquidation – we will try to rouse the Aldebaran through the novels of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Gianni. And you, what would you like people to remember of us?
Stefano. The hair-style and the table posture.