Twelfth part of Interior Sites Project
By Renato Cuocolo and Roberta Bosetti
With Roberta Bosetti and Renato Cuocolo
Direction Renato Cuocolo
Management Claudio Ponzana
“Along with our parents, the stories of others (movies, television, books, pictures) raised us, socialized us, entertained us, comforted us, deceived us, disciplined us, told us what we could do and what we couldn’t do. And they played a key role in turning each of us into a medley of all the good and bad people we’ve heard and seen about. We have a theater in our mind. ” C. B.
MM&M is an exploration on the identity and the artificial nature of autobiographies. Starting from autobiographical elements, it faces the ambiguous relationship between actor/person/character and reality/fiction.
We have an autobiography of ourselves as viewers. Movies are a piece of life of each viewer. And the closing credits mark, with the lights coming back in the hall, the end of a fragment of existence experienced while watching the screen. In our autobiography as spectators, cinema represents a new dimension of experience. A place where the fantastic becomes plausible, or rather ordinary. A place that changes our perception of reality and of ourselves: the conscious and unconscious the dreams and the memories.
Even our memories are blurred with images of movies and photographies, and the perception of our past is dyed black and white or with the warm colours of the fifties and sixties, the golden age of the cinema.
With MM&M we seek to build a personal identity based on cinematic shots and cuts.
MM&M is a journey with uncertain boundaries, between the feelings we experience and those we picture, between what we think we are and what we are forced to be. Illusion, representation, fiction overlap and finally become one with what it is.
MM&M is a performance about identity. An exploration of identity, considering that you are much more genuine the closer you get to what you dream to be.
To do this, MM&M draws on a narrative built on those film clips that almost unconsciously have accompanied us in our lives. High culture and popular culture mixed together in search of the construction of an imaginary biography. Small clips, movie phrases, memorable scenes that have built us. Self-portrait as another.
There is a homology between cinema and mind and it is clear that the relationship is with the unconscious. The cinema is a machine of ghosts, of the past that comes back, the uncanny. The repeatability of the images and their perishable nature. At the centre, in depth the image of death.
On the screen there is something that never ceases to die, a time constrained in the flow of the film, the film is death at work 24 frames per second on the face of the actors. Masks and monstrosities.
The cinema as a place of narcissistic identification. MM&M faces the equation screen equal mirror that reflects not only our image but also what in our image is missing. In a process in which these unconscious fragments of films, seen in different periods of our lives, exceed their limits, deepen their perspectives, and never cease to change.
A theater that you do not forget, a great actress. The Age Melbourne
The jewel in the crown of Australian theater. Rigorous and exciting. One and only . The Sydney Morning Herald
This project reminds me of Ingmar Bergman and his relationship with Liv Ullman, meeting the same powers of observation, the same feeling, the same voltage to recreate a world of desires suspended. And ‘as if the theater became simultaneously cinematic and incredibly personal. University Los Angeles, Real Time
Cuocolo / Bosetti
Cuocolo / Bosetti IRAA Theatre as he wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald “are the cutting edge of contemporary Australian performance.” Their work has received many accolades from critics and the public in the International Festival from 26 nations.Winners of numerous awards including UNESCO Awards, Green Room Award, MO Award and the prize Cavour their performances are presented in the houses or hotels where they live thus exposing intimate space and home to the viewer-visitor in search of an impossible, illegal geography of intimacy.In their performances the theater and life, reality and fiction, actor and character overlap.
Founded in Rome in 1978 by Renato Cuocolo The IRAA Theatre has created a series of seven trilogies that have been presented in twenty-six countries on four continenti.Nel 1988, the company and ‘moved to Melbourne where and’ eventually became the leading Australian company innovation (Flag Company). Since 2012 he opened an office in Vercelli in Italy where, with the assistance of the Australia Council and some of the main Italian theater festival, has presented a series of new works and repertory.
The last work of the company were presented with success and critical interest in numerous festivals among which: Vienna Festival, Adelaide International Festival (2 editions), Melbourne International Arts Festival (4 issues), Sydney Olympic Art Festival (2 editions), Olinda Milan (2 editions), Contemporary Teatro Metastasio in Prato (6 issues), Festival of the Hills Torino Contemporary Creation (7 editions), A Theatre in the Houses Arlette (5 editions), Theatre of the Cough Genoa European Capital of Culture, the Teatro Eliseo in Rome, Es .Terni, International Festival of Andria, San Diego Contemporary Theatre, Lincoln Center New York, Cite ‘Paris, Calais Le Channel Scène Nationale, Goteborgs Dans & Teater Festival (2 editions), Waseda International Centre Tokyo.
Based on the elaboration of elements taken from their lives, Cuocolo / Bosetti build a series of shows in which reality and fiction overlap. Their work challenges the traditional separation between actor and character. It ‘an invitation to reconsider the boundaries between performance and reality, between art and life, fiction and autobiography.
Their work normally for a few spectators at a time, taking place in non-theatrical spaces: private houses and hotels where Cuocolo / Bosetti really live. The hotels and the houses are not sets but traps reality.
In June 2000, comes to Melbourne, in their home, The Secret Room. Scheduled for 24 replicates exceeds 1600, winning numerous international awards.
In 2004 he was presented as the central event of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, The Diary Project, a ‘obsession with memory. After keeping a diary for a year Cuocolo / Bosetti go to live for 16 days, without ever leaving, the Arts Centre, the largest theater in Melbourne, where 39400 people are going to attend the reading / staging of the diary.
In 2005 it was the turn of Private Eye, presented in two rooms of a hotel (The Grand Hyatt 24th, and 48th floor) for one spectator at a time. A show about identity, about the points of passage, on the precariousness of existence.
In 2009, The Persistence of Dreams. In an apartment completely obscured the viewer with a night vision device, which enables an uncertain vision, becomes part of a disturbing dream.
2011: Theatre on a line takes place entirely through a phone call between actor and spectator.
In 2012 was born in Vercelli in the true childhood home of Bosetti, Roberta back at home. The house is made from a birch cross from five yards for a show that examines the possibility / necessity of the return. In 2013 you leave the house to deal with the city, its streets, its contradictions, with The Walk, radio path led into the city.
For 2014 is in the works a version of the Cherry Orchard and work of Emily Dickinson.