RAFALES | MACHINE (CUNT) FIRE

Raffiche was born from the impossibility of restaging Jean Genet’s Splendid’s fourteen years after Motus’s “historical” performance, with a female-only cast. The rules of international copyright expect of theatre makers to respect the sex of characters, as they are indicated in the script. Even with an author like Genet who, for his whole life, fought for the necessity of metamorphosis, of betrayal and ambiguity. From this surprising denial exploded the desire to work on the themes of identity and revolt, of the refusal to adhere to a preconceived deference towards the separation of reality in male and female. An original script by Magdalena Barile and Luca Scarlini starts from the same narrative situation (a group of rebels besieged in a hotel – whose name remains from the original, only the name as a homage to the French playwright) to tell of mutating and subversive identities, creatures that have suspended the will to define themselves. Characters who have, for a long time, used performance as a form of political activism, and who now, in a situation of threat and constant persecution from powerful conservative lobbies, have moved on to another kind of struggle. They have taken up machine guns, without foregoing their natural elegance, to state “another” vision of society, without pre-established roles and heterocentral control. A show for hotel suites, that stages, really close to the audience, almost a touch away, the pungent and exciting breath of revolution, the sexy smells of transmodern witches. Not only are they back. They remain with us to sing a tune other than preconceptions, stereotypes and prohibition.

In memory of the Raffiche Queen: Damir Todorovic

CE N’EST QU’UN DÉBUT.

RAFFICHE was the opening performance of the special project HELLO STRANGER that the Municipality of Bologna dedicated to the 25th anniversary of Motus’s resistant artistic activity. This evocative (and provocative) path across various places connected to Motus witnessed, between October and December 2016, a whirwind of repertoire performances, conferences, films, installations and the release of the HELLO STRANGER book. This controversial performance premiered at the VIE Festival in Bologna (ERT) from October 18th to 22nd 2016. It is an “outlaw” homage to Jean Genet’s Splendid’s with an all female cast: a link with the past that, at the same time, reconfigures our own present. We have chosen Genet because, more than any other author, he is coherent with the dramaturgical line that overrode all of HELLO STRANGER, namely the reflexion on identity and its plastic transformations.

ÜBER RAFFICHE (nude expanded version)

Exploring, digging up, crossing the borders of the blank page and of our own shows is a usual practice. Deciding that a work is “finished” is one of the most difficult decisions to take. Often we fling the finish line far away, leaving it suspended… The birth of Raffiche already comes from an insubordinate need for openness: on the occasion of Hello Stranger, the project of the Municipality of Bologna which celebrated the 25 years of Motus (Autumn 2016), we thought about a remake of Splendid’s (theatre piece by Jean Genet, which we staged for the first time in 2002, with an all-male cast). But the simple re-staging was not enough, we decided to cross the threshold of sex, the armed and over-protected barrier of gender by imagining the show with an all-female cast. Despite the peremptory prohibition by the international copyright – which prevents from changing identity to the characters of protected works – we continued with other words (those of Magdalena Barile’s and Luca Scarlini’s) and with other intentions.

We had decided to keep the original and extravagant location of the first staging in 2002, namely luxurious hotel suites, where the piece is in fact set, and this has been case for the premiere, in the prestigious Royal Hotel Carlton in Bologna, the Rimini Grand Hotel and other hotels…

This pseudo-realistic and strongly cinematographic version will continue existing since taking the audience out of the theatre and invading a real hotel is an operation we are interested in pursuing… But the urge to demolish walls has planted its roots in us so deeply that, for the 2017 edition of Santarcangelo Festival, we are attempting a new experiment: Über Raffiche, a nude (expanded version) of Raffiche, which will not be set in hotels but in an open space, as the big emptied room of a gym. No walls but only some elegant furniture, no behind the scenes but everything in sight, nude: at the centre just the bodies of our beloved armed actresses.

RAFFICHE: scarica rassegna stampa