THE CLASS. A docupuppets for puppets and humans

a show by Fabiana Iacozzilli | CrAnPi
collaborating with the dramatization Marta Meneghetti, Giada Parlanti, Emanuele Silvestri
artistic collaboration Lorenzo Letizia, Tiziana Tomasulo, Lafabbrica
performer Michela Aiello, Andrei Balan, Antonia D’Amore, Francesco Meloni, Marta Meneghetti
scenes and puppets Fiammetta Mandich
lights Raffaella Vitiello
sound Hubert Westkemper
sound technician Jacopo Ruben Dell’Abate
assistant directors Francesco Meloni, Silvia Corona, Arianna Cremona
set photography Tiziana Tomasulo and Valeria Tomasulo
consultant Piergiorgio Solvi
special thanks to Giorgio Testa
communication and press office Antonino Pirillo
production Antonino Pirillo, Giorgio Andriani
co-production CrAnPi Lafabbrica Teatro Vascello Carrozzerie | n.o.t
with the support of Residenza IDRA and Teatro Cantiere Florida/Elsinor as part of the project CURA 2018
and of Nuovo Cinema Palazzo
and the support of Periferie Artistiche Centro di Residenza Multidisciplinare della Regione Lazio

“From 1983 to 1988 myself and other thirty souls were primary school pupils in a class of an Institute run by nuns which is now a holiday home. The Institute had the name Sisters of Charity. Our only teacher, also a sister of charity, was Sister Lidia and she died over twenty years ago. It has never been easy for me to talk about the years spent in this Institute and the strict education we were subjected to. Thirty later I decided I would create a show based on those memories and I started to search for my ex classmates, believing it was essential to recreate that “community” with which I had shared such experience. To begin to put together the pieces of the “history”I interviewed them, asking very simple questions such as “What was Sister Lidia like?”; “What do you remember about her?”; “Do you remember what happened in class?”; “Were you happy when she died?” (Fabiana Iacozzilli) 

From what had arisen during this first phase the show began to take shape: a docupuppets involving both puppets and people, but also a collective ritual somewhere in between The Dead Class by Kantor and The cannibals by Tabori where the adult re-reads his memories of a childhood spent in fear of being punished, interpreted by puppets in the hands of a mysterious ex-machine. These memories/pieces of wood, children reduced to marionettes, stooges of lifeless youth, impotent and manipulated like objects, move without feeling on old wooden boards which bring back memories of school desks, butchers’ chopping boards or the operating table of a past experiment. Silence all around. Only the sound of pencils writing and schoolmates breathing. And also the sound of chalk being used up in writing dictations on the blackboard. Parents are absent. No trace of them. The parents have only been drawn on the corpse of a blackboard but then soon after erased. In the silence of their footsteps, these small wooden bodies move in a Sister Lidia-World where even God lowers his gaze when He sees her.Sister Lidia, the only real life presence, the living figure of a man or woman in the middle of all these objects, escapes the sight of puppets and audience. We can hear her footsteps, see her hands, make out some features in the darkness, even smell the whiff of her cigar. We are aware she frightens us, that deep down, in the deepest depth of each of us, audience puppet performer technician board or classmate, she is the generator of fear. In this reflection concerning the deep meaning of memory, in this research for gone-by fragments of memory, my classmates helped me find a direction and eventually to understand the character of the work. The class found its true meaning at the moment when I gave up on what I had originally wanted to say and I started listening to the subject I was researching. At this point a question arose, the question to which the show itself tries to answer What are we going to do with the pain?”; “what are human beings able to become starting from their own pain?”

in the framework of MEDIA DANCE
shows, debates with artists, “alternation school-job” projects

Media Dance aims to combine the experience of theatrical vision with a course of study (pre- and post-show) addressed to students, accompanied by meetings with experts, debates, workshops which trespass in other artistic languages. The project was designed as a tool useful for teachers to deal with contemporary issues, experienced in everyday life: from the relationship with the otherness to the acceptance of diversity, from tolerance to the relationship with body.

Information:
Mara Loro – loro@piemontedalvivo.it – +39 392 2831375‬