STAND BY ME
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SANPAPIÉ PRODUCTION
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Choreography and direction
Lara Guidetti
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Dramaturgy
Saverio Bari in collaboration with Gianluca Bonzani
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Masks
Maria Barbara De Marco
There are no monsters in this world;
they’re just people.
There are strong people and there are weak people.
I think I’m an amalgam of the two.
Judge for yourself.
(Dennis Nilsen)
CAST &
CREDITS
With Sofia Casprini, Gioele Cosentino, Matteo Sacco
A Sanpapié production
Choreography and direction: Lara Guidetti
Dramaturgy: Saverio Bari in collaboration with Gianluca Bonzani
Sound elaborations: Marcello Gori
Masks: Maria Barbara De Marco
Set design: Maria Croce
Costumes: Fabrizio Calanna
With the support of MiC – Ministry of Culture
Synopsis
IDENTITY 2.0
The play is inspired by the auto-biography of Dennis Nilsen, an English serial murderer, who reveals in great detail his 12 murders between emotions, reasons and strict rituals. The cruel banality of loneliness, the absence of personal freedom, in the England of the early 1980s where icons, young people on the run and homosexuality remains the antithesis of family normality, place the horror in the frame of everyday life.
It’s Christmas night, the fear of emptiness and abandonment crushes the mind and makes the thoughts sputter in search of a solution: he looks at that young man in his bed and thinks: “he must stay!”. An empty, disposable body… And then the fantasy becomes real, the ‘monster’ swings into action and kills, and Nilsen keeps the body with him, places it in a crib of horror, preserved for the imitation of normal domestic life and lives with it. But time consumes the remains and renews the need. And so again, 11 times over. A story of love and death, where ancient archetypes and reiterated stereotypes parade, a dance of crossed mirrors and triple images, between visions of self and transfigurations, where fragments of bodies and memories find their place in that vast and timeless space that is the human soul.
On stage three dancers, two men and a woman of different ages, who wear the same integral mask for the entire duration of the performance: they are the three different souls and functions of which the murderer speaks referring to himself throughout his life. The choreography is articulated in a constant reversal of the active, passive and observer roles of the danced action, elaborating the mechanism of passivity/reactivity as both an aesthetic and poetic form. The absence of muscular activity, the relationship with weight and with the skeletal movement of the body, one’s own and that of the other, the fall, the repetition, the manipulation punctuate an eclectic movement score, that challenges itself in the rapid and fast changing of environments according to a cinematographic montage criterion. The repetition of scenes, movements and soundscapes with small but constant internal variations reconstructs Nilsen’s complex journey through his everyday life up to the final and necessary point, the unveiling, the fall of the mask, for the inevitable confrontation with that society that will thus be able to exorcise evil by pointing out and imprisoning the monster, and by being shocked by his appearance that is so normal, so common.
The dramaturgy is composed from Dennis Nilsen’s autobiography, History of a drowning boy, and from viewing documents of the time. It is structured according to a film-writing model that juxtaposes fragments and repetitions in a non-linear manner: this is to account for the psychic split of the protagonist and the seriality of the ritual. The sound dramaturgy is made up of pieces that are always connected with Nilsen’s biography or with the years of his story, in which sound design insinuates itself, reworking the sound to define the environments and to cast the dance in the concreteness of the action.