16.
Tuscany/Rome, March 2012
The following is Duška Radosavljević's blog piece on the 16th Fence meeting, which
took place in two locations in Italy in March 2012. Duška's blog in full is
at: http://theatretravelogues.blogspot.it/
What a week! Probably worth two or three weeks rolled into one - and that's
only on the food front...
Facts first: I am here with the Fence -
an 'international network of playwrights and people who make playwriting happen'.
The network exists largely thanks to the enthusiasm and generosity of its members
who find ways to keep it going by facilitating meetings around interesting occasions.
The Fence 16 is facilitated by Claudia Della Setta, an actress and theatre director
based in Rome and Tel Aviv and a founder member of
Afrodita Compagnia. The Fence 16 consists of two phases - 1) a retreat in
Claudia's house in Tuscany and 2) a residency with
Afrodita Compagnia at Teatro
Valle - or more precisely
Teatro Velle Occupato - in Rome. Since its occupation began in June
2011, in protest against planned privatisation of the theatre, theatre workers who
inhabit the building have made opportunities available for companies to take artistic
directorship of the theatre on a week by week basis. Afrodita Compagnia's week
is 26th March - 2 April. Afrodita have chosen a theme for their week: 'Masculine,
Feminine, Love, Resistance'. A play called Non written in English and
French by two Fence members Sara Clifford and Denis Baronnett will be translated
by Claudia into Italian and read as part of the residency. There will also be a
presentation from the
Arab-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa.
Phase 1: Tuscany
Beautiful sunny mornings. The smell of freshly brewed coffee. Distant horizons
lined by Italian Umbrella Pine trees. Claudia's family holiday home is a proper
Italian family home anticipating several generations of the same family around dinner
tables and under the same roof. Around a dozen of us are comfortably accommodated
here, and several are staying in an agriturismo up the road. The talk of theatre
and playwriting is interlaced with occasional table-football playing, sunbathing
and cooking - a single internet dongle doing the rounds between individual computers.
Because The World Theatre Day is due on 27th March, Fence member Doug Howe is making
a film which will also be screened at Teatro Valle. He splits up John Malkovich's
official message for that day and asks us to deliver individual lines one by one
in our own languages - in addition to English, French, Spanish and Italian, we also
have Swedish, Bulgarian, Serbian and Hebrew in the mix. Doug picks interesting locations
for us in and around the house - I end up squinting into the sun, my incidental
anxiety-generated spikiness underlined by massive cacti behind me. Our Spaniard
Beatriz Cabur, meanwhile, gets to compete with a smouldering flame in her frame.
Sarah G. and I had been tasked with making sure the work part of the meeting gets
done - so we at first try to subtly keep things on track, make sure everyone gets
a go at speaking about themselves and their work, schedule in some works in progress
among members and allow space and time for Claudia, Sara C., Denis, Hilary and Sofia
to work towards their presentation of Non. Very few of the people present
have actually met each other before, even though the work on Non is a continuation
of two previous Fence meetings. Sara C. is only able to join us two days after we
have arrived, so she has to be brought up to date with what the group has been up
to. At times it is very hard keeping things the British side of chaotic. Both Sarah
G. and I do our best, though at times I realise the only option I have is to play
the bad cop...
We get two readings out on Saturday afternoon: 1) An extract from
Hotel Project which was written and directed by Beatriz and Doug in New
York as an interactive performance and is now being re-written as a musical. They
test it on us as they try and decide on the form of the piece and its revised ending.
2) Sarah G.'s monologue Red Shoes was originally presented last month
at Theatre 503 as part of an
Agent 160 showcase. Sarah is on the lookout for other fairytales to adapt
and suggestions come in thick and fast especially since everyone is bowled over
by the monologue (featuring a South London single mother caught up in the whirlwind
of consumerist desire as it erupted rather violently last summer during the London
riots and led her to a fatal pair of red Louboutin shoes).
Every evening we manage to also get in some heated discussions on our set topics
of love, resistance and gender politics (though these are often quite spontaneous),
and also on cultural difference - as this is quite a prominent feature of our group.
But we also end up cooking some fantastic food for each other. Kazem's Iranian
potato galettes (with whisky) prompted Beatriz to add a recipe section to a library
she has been building during our Tuscany meeting so that all the references we invoked
in our discussions could be subsequently accessed at our leisure.
On the morning of the last day we finally hear the complete reading of Non
- a rare privilege as the Roman audience will only get extracts. The play concerns
a fifty year old working class English woman N. who is about to commit suicide at
the beginning of the play, but is interrupted in the act by the ghost of Sid Vicious
who draws her attention to a TV ad which is playing a number N. had written with
her French punk band in the 1970s. This prompts her to make a journey back to France
and down the memory lane... There are moments of great wit and fantastic writing
in the play, and the whole thing is all the more impressive being done as a joint
project between two writers whose knowledge of each other's languages is limited.
We briefly vote for our favourite scenes and then disperse on our individual last
minute missions. Doug, Beatriz, Sarah G., and I are taken to the beach by Fred,
who then drives back for Mia and Sara C. Fred is our hero in every respect! Sarah
G. and I do a beach version of her Ashtanga routine - which my body is extremely
grateful for for a few days to come. Doug and Beatriz disappear in a long walk.
Mia eventually disappears to Sienna (thanks to Fred who drives her to the station)
and six of us are neatly packed into Sofia's four-seater car and taken back
just in time before she has to drive back to Rome.
And then it rains.
Phase 2: Rome
'Che casino!' - I believe is the right phrase in Italian for how our day
started on Monday morning. The bus driver who is taking us ten minutes down the
road to the local train station at 15 Euro a head is too early - not everyone's
even arrived from their agriturismo bedrooms, let alone had coffee or breakfast.
There's commotion about some male abuse of female toiletries. And then, when
we are all finally together, our luggage on the bus and our bums on the seats, Fred
and Denis are frantically climbing over the gates back into the house to retrieve
Denis's computer he had left behind.
At the station, Sarah G. has her credit card stuck in a ticket vending machine,
Beatriz has her money swallowed up and some of our travellers don't even manage
to get a ticket at all. Once on the train, the conductor has to spend so much time
with us solving our individual ticket issues he eventually lets Denis travel without
one. As we draw nearer to Rome, conversations about gelato ensue.
Rome is hot, summery almost. Sarah G. takes us expertly around the streets of Rome,
walks us all the way from Termini station to our destination Teatro Valle Occupato.
Almost immediately, Fred procures and supplies us with the theatre wi fi password.
We are back in the civilisation. Claudia and Sofia turn up and take us for lunch
to a local restaurant which has a deal with the occupiers. After lunch, I have my
very first coffee of this year! We are in a cafe which does the best coffee in Rome
- and I can now vouch that this is indeed the case.
In Rome we are joined by Saskia from Holland and later in the evening by Jonathan
Meth.
In the days that follow we try and work out exactly what is going on in Teatro Valle
on the level of pragmatic detail. This is the story I manage to infer from all the
information I have gathered:
In June 2011, theatre workers at Teatro Valle staged a three day protest against
the decision to make the previously state owned theatre a private enterprise of
the city of Rome. Built in 1727, this was a theatre with a rich history - its current
occupiers characterise it as a 'house of revolution': this was the first
theatre where women performed on stage in Italy, political prisoners were hiding
here during the Second World War, a fight broke out around the premiere of Pirandello's
Six Characters in Search of an Author here and - 'most importantly'
as they say jokingly - this was the theatre where Mozart fucked in the boxes! The
boxes are a distinct feature of the theatre whose auditorium consists entirely of
boxed up spaces accommodating four chairs each. There are three tiers of boxes with
27 boxes in each tier, and a fourth additional one with 54 individual seats (without
divisions between them). These became our red velvet bedrooms during our stay -
just big enough for a single blow up mattress, a book and a bottle of water.
The occupation of the theatre has continued since June last year till the present
day. Though the occupiers look tired - big black bags under there eyes - they keep
going and are tireless in their attempts to explain to us what they are doing and
make us feel comfortable in their midst. So, 'occupare', they tell us, has
two meanings in Italian - 'to occupy' and 'to take care'. For them
the notion of 'taking care' is a defining principle of their occupation,
and interestingly the occupiers have predominantly been women. There is apparently
a Valle Occupato baby on the way too... Politically, they are keen to develop a
model of governance that is entirely from the bottom up rather than top down. This
means that they do not vote in order to make decisions, they discuss issues until
they all reach a consensus on what to do. This is taking time but they seem comfortable
with the idea. Currently they are writing their Statute, although they have defined
five principles which they all feel passionate about: Agora (forum), Training, Vocation,
Common Good and Eco-Sustainability. They have had messages of support from Ostermeier
and Mnouchkine, and they have also included major Italian figures in their workshops
and forum discussions. One of their first invited speakers was the Italian philosopher
Federica Giardini and the playwright Fausto Paravidino. Currently, the occupiers
have one clear aim - to raise the 250,000 Euro they need in order to become a foundation
and therefore acquire a legal status. So far, they have collected 80,000.
As some of the Fence members sit around in the foyer on our last day together informally
reading Trevor Griffiths's play
The Party chosen by Jonathan Meth as our present to the Valle, the occupiers
spontaneously gather around us. They tell us that they wish to foreground playwriting
and to change the system by which the Italian playwrights have had their work commissioned
up until now through contests, judged by independent panels. We were told of an
informal survey which highlighted that, among 122 playwrights, the only thing they
had in common was the experience of solitude - clearly a far cry from the kind of
work being done in the UK and elsewhere to integrate the playwright into the rehearsal
process, or indeed even from the Fence whose raison d'être is networking between
writers... Another one of their concerns, inspired by Giardini, is to address the
notion of language and its decolonisation from recent history. Terms such as 'meritocracy',
'populo', 'liberta', they tell us, have been completely contaminated
by Berlusconi's government...
It is interesting that my journey through Europe started with the conference in
Ghent where I spoke about the power of theatre to create a community - and to resurrect
and rehabilitate that term after its post-communist demise. At the end of my trip
I was confronted with three more models of community-building and reinvention of
governance models:
1) There's Valle Occupato, genuinely doing things differently. Reinventing ways
of relating with each other, with their culture, with their audience. Allowing things
to grow organically. Believing in the possibility of genuine consensus - whatever
it takes.
2) There is the Arab-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa. 'An island of sanity' as they
call themselves. A group of artists braving some serious storms in order to bring
together the communities otherwise divided by history and politics. They introduced
themselves to us as people who sometimes violently disagree with each other but
who still love and respect each other. They agree to disagree, and they believe
in the importance of being together.
3) And then there's the Fence, which Beatriz, on her first encounter with it,
summarised as an 'elephant'. Its constituent parts are different, it looks
different from different angles, its members don't even all have a language
in common, and yet it is an entity.
All three would suggest that we are moving towards a modus operandi which is closer
to an improvisation than a tightly directed show. Or in the words of Jean-Luc Nancy,
we are moving towards 'being together' rather than essentialised 'togetherness'.