VOICES FROM THE PAST . THE PROJECT . VOICES FOR THE SCHOOLS . POLICY
Somebody had warned us.
Many voices had risen, clamantes in deserto.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Edmond Rostand, Euripide, Alexis De Tocqueville, Ray Bradbury, Albert Einstein, Henry D. Thoreau, Gilles Deluze, John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Primo Levi, Henri Laborit, Virginia Woolf, Eduardo Galeano, Benjamin Franklin, Tacito, John Milton, Dacia Maraini, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Hannah Arendt, Honoré de Balzac, Ennio Flaiano, Bertolt Brecht, Tucidide… who knows how many others, still.
Listening to their words today, getting them out of drawers or from shelves, dusting off old LPs or opening up newspapers yellowed by time, they offer us a key to interpretation – almost humiliating in their predictions – as to how we arrived at this point.
Fragments of freedom of thought, like messages in a bottle entrusted to the tides of time: we researched and cataloged those who have more resonance with current events (and we are continuing to collect more and more), we have removed all references to the author and the age, we have given them a new voice and related them to the present time through music, sounds and images. From all this a thematic narration has been born that may not be surprising at the moment in which time order is re-established and every phrase is put back in its context. Is it possible that everything was already predicted?
Recycling memory
A tin can or an old plastic container can be recycled and be useful again to the community. It is equally important to retrieve and give new voice to the words of those who came before us and were able to read, through the events of their time, all that we are living today.
“Voci nel Deserto” has became a regular appointment with memory every last Friday of the month at Brancaleone in Rome. The number of events has increased during the first three years of the project’s existence, and the theatrical rave, open to all and absolutely free, it is being celebrated in a few cities now. It is fed by the commitment and generosity of actors and the public in keeping open the spatial-temporal passage between the past and the future. The project is, in short, a collective idea of civil theater making in which anyone can participate by signaling fragments, promoting the initiative or even replicating it freely in his or her own city, as it has been happening in Bergamo, Bologna, Rimini, Ravenna, Catania and, abroad, Paris and New York.
Marcello Marchesi used to question himself: “If Giordano Bruno had a megaphone, would he have escaped the pyre?”
Contact – Kairos Italy Theater : info@kitheater.com
