by Kate Tempest
translation by Riccardo Duranti
a project by Bluemotion
ideation and direction Giorgina Pi
with Sylvia De Fanti, Xhulio Petushi, Gabriele Portoghese
music, sound landscape Collettivo Angelo Mai
production Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
in collaboration with Angelo Mai / Bluemotion
Bluemotion thanks Ateliersi for the Creative Residence with Aura Satz
lenght 1 hour and 30 minutes
reservation required on the website www.mast.org
played in Italian with English subtitles
We die
So others can be born
We age
So others can be young
The point of life is live,
Love if you can. Then pass it on.
Kate Tempest
(e tu sei solo una cosa che capita come un elefante o un narciso) (and you are just a thing happening like an elephant or a narcissus) is a project by Bluemotion about the detachment from material existence, the end of life, the compassion of those who remain.
Starting from investigation on the farewell to life, two important voices from English written word, coming from different generations and backgrounds, are compared. One is Caryl Churchill, the most outstanding English theatre writer alive, with her work Here We Go.
The other is the revolutionary rapper, poetess, writer, performer Kate Tempest and her work Wasted written for the theatre.
Dramatic and poetic texts are approached as mixed compositions, between scenic and musical writing, from Richard Strauss’s Lieder to rap, from Slam poetry to post-rock and hip-hop acoustics, from orchestral composition to the bare voice.
Bluemotion’s investigation mixes word and music at every stage, sharing creation with actors, actresses and musicians.
Kate Tempest has been a total revolution for the English cultural scene. Her works are central to poetry in Great Britain, where she is universally appreciated as a total artist, rapper, liver performer, poetess and writer. She is just thirty years old and she sings about a suffering generation, torn between ambitions and broken dreams. The streets of the city, which is always London to Kate Tempest, are the literary place where music, poetry and politics meet, where harsh and moving characters come to life.
Wasted guards all of Kate Tempest’s poetics, written for the scene. It is a story about two men and a woman meeting to commemorate the tenth anniversary of their best friend’s death. Confrontations, reflections and illusions stream on the ridge of sorrow. Becoming what we wanted seems no longer possible, it is only possible to be, although with difficulty and tear, what we can. From sunset to dawn, in a city which for twelve hours becomes the periphery of an imagined world, confessions and mistakes mix with balances, drugs and attempts to finally be oneself.
“Hold you own”, Kate Tempest’s famous motto, has become epic and public speech in England, in front of hundreds of thousands of people.
And Wasted is at the dawn of this awareness, it is the desperate backward step to get a running start. It is a work conceived in a versatile language which is poetry, stream of consciousness, music and rifts of tiny, shared everyday life. A choir of ancient inspiration, interpreted by the very characters, reasserts the rarefied humanity which the expression “Wasted” – polysemous and untranslatable – contains. Lost and consumed, the protagonists of this story drag us to that Waste Land which has become our life, a desert where, neither young nor old enough, we never seem destined to be good enough.
However, wasted and alone, we persist in the attempt to live the first day of our new life.
Giorgina Pi and Bluemotion, biographies
Giorgina Pi
Giorgina Pi is an artist born and grown up in Rome.
Graduated in Dams (faculty of arts, music and drama), she studies direction and dramaturgy in Paris.
Essay and article writer, since the beginning she combines work in theatre with investigation on the contemporary and with art comparison.
Director, activist, video maker and feminist, she is part of the artistic ensemble Angelo Mai – an independent space for the arts in Rome (Franco Quadri Award 2016).
With the group Bluemotion, she creates shows and imagines surroundings, in an investigation which conjugates scenic arts, visual research and music.
She has collaborated with artists such as Motus, Fanny & Alexander, Balletto Civile.
In recent years, she has worked on texts by one of the most important theatre writers in the world, the English Caryl Churchill, with mise en espaces, translations, radio plays and, above all, supervision of shows.
Bluemotion
Bluemotion is a team born in Rome within the artistic and politic experience called Angelo Mai. Performer, directors, musicians and visual artists gather to create from their own suggestions, comparing their own views on the present time and on art. Bluemotion’s works are always collective creations, resulting from the group members’ exchanges and views. Bluemotion creates, lives and shares in the independent space for the arts called Angelo Mai. Artists from Bluemotion are also activists for human rights and for the rights of workers in the entertainment industry. This is why have often been tried and their civic commitment has been judged as a criminal activity. Promptly acquitted by any attempt to restrict their freedom, they keep participating in the ten-year activities of the Angelo Mai group, awarded with the prestigious Ubu Franco Quadri prize in 2016. From 2015 Bluemotion has been committed in disseminating the work of the English playwright Caryl Churchill through Italy, participating in the theatre and publishing project Non Normale, Non Rassicurante. Progetto Caryl Churchill (Not Normal. Not reassuring. Caryl Churchill project).
Directions, translations, essays, radio plays edited by the group have aroused so much interest that Settimo Cielo (Seventh heaven), co-produced by Angelo Mai with Rome Theatre, has been candidated for two Ubu awards (Best foreign text and Best sound environment).