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© Photo: Andrea Sacchi K.S. |
© Photo: Andrea Sacchi K.S.
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Le storie del Signor Keuner - Press «Il Signor Keuner»Maria Grazia De Gregori L'Unità - 27 July 2006 Emigration as the search for a better life, but also as the quest for that primary necessity which is freedom. From this general reflection, which is the basis of Moni Ovadia's and Roberto Andò's wonderful new show, comes the idea of staging Bertolt Brecht's "The stories of Mr. Keuner": a sort of pivotal meditation, through parables and disquieting phrases which, by mouth of an alter-ego of the author, moves through illusions and delusions guided by the bitter burden of exile...
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Le storie del Signor Keuner - Rassegna stampa «Le storie del signor Keuner» Maria Grazia De Gregori L'Unità - 27 luglio 2006
Emigrazione come ricerca di una vita migliore ma anche come bisogno di quel bene primario che è la libertà. Parte proprio da questa riflessione generale, che sta alla base del geniale spettacolo di Moni Ovadia e Roberto Andò, l’idea di mettere in scena Le storie del signor Keuner di Bertolt Brecht, sorta di epocale riflessione fra parabole e affermazioni inquietanti che, per bocca di un personaggio alter ego dell’autore, si muove fra illusioni e delusioni guidate dall’amaro peso dell’esilio. Costruito fra passato e presente, dove è il gusto della citazione, del frammento che si confonde con il ricordo a fare da traliccio, Le storie del signor Keuner secondo Andò e Ovadia (che, vestito di scuro, ne è il protagonista nel ruolo del curatore di una mostra del tutto speciale che mescola reperti perduti del Novecento, pronto a prendere la parola ma anche ad osservare), sono un vero e proprio viaggio fra immagini e voci, improvvise e inaspettate analogie, lacerti di un sogno che se mai c’è stato non c’è più, delitti impuniti, fotogrammi di film muti e parole fra personaggi che vanno e che vengono ognuno con la sua storia, ognuno con il suo ricordo e un esilio da raccontare: dalla vita, dalla libertà, dalla patria. |
© Photo: Andrea Sacchi K.S.
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Le storie del Signor Keuner - Text fragments (...) Video Che Guevara, Moro, Falcone, Dalla Chiesa. In the window: Mantegna's Christ. On the wall: subtitles of the liturgical chant.Lord of the Universe, we invoke you as sequestered men implore their abductors for release. Moni steps to the centre of the audience. Roman sings the Polish national anthem. Ivo gives a military salute. Moni: "The abyss which separates the actor from the audience as the dead are separated from the living, this abyss, which of all the elements of the theatre is the one which most clearly shows its sacred ritual origin, has gradually lost its importance." The whole group of musicians stands in a line, stage front. Moni returns towards the stage and stops on the steps. Moni "But the theatre is the world and nothing more than this" Video on the wall: oceanic Russian parades and great waves of sea water -translation in window. All solemnly sing the German Communist Party anthem. Refrain Forward and do not forget which is our strength. In good luck and bad forward, do not forget solidarity! Rise, peoples of the earth! Unite for this: so that she may become your great source of nutrition. Refrain Black, white, brown and yellow! Put an end to their massacres! If the peoples themselves start to speak together they will soon find an agreement Refrain (twice) Proletarians of the world, unite and you will be free. Your great regiments will crush all tyranny. Forward and never forget, put the question in a concrete form, in good luck or in bad: Who does the day belong to? And whose is the world? Maxim on the cart, comes out with the sound of percussion holding Soviet symbols (red flag, etc.) and moves as if he were directing traffic, using masks of Lenin, Stalin (Marx and Engels) which he carries hanging from his belt. He also uses a police whistle. He is rolled off the stage as the song ends. Roman continues with his mute song and Ivo with his gesture. Moni (Benjamin): Dramatic nature... (all return to their seats, Maxims exits, Moni goes back down among the audience) ...these words which the theatre has made common do not exclude that one may make theatre not with facts but with a simple third person, "he who thinks". In a way, Bertold Brecht had something similar in mind. We could go further and say that Brecht attempted to make of "he who thinks", in other words of he who is wise, the dramatic heroe, the cornerstone of epic theatre. |
© Photo: Andrea Sacchi K.S.
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Le storie del Signor Keuner - Author's notes Mr. Keuner is the alter-ego of the exiled Brecht. The exile of Keuner is double, like the exile actually suffered by Brecht: exiled as an "excellent" opposer of the Nazi regime, the great playwright was first deprived of any certainty regarding his material livelihood - "not only have they deprived me of my house, my fish pond and my car, they have also stolen my theatre and my audience from me." In the end, he was thrown into an random condition of uncertainty and disorientation typical of all exiles. One in which Brecht, as he describes in a famous poem, carried with him "a brick, to show how his house had once been". The second exile was when he returned to his own city of Berlin, the city where that Communism he had so fervently wished for had finally been instituted. It must have been an excruciating disappointment to realise that, just when he was finally restored to his own theatre and to his beloved audience, poor Brecht would fall into the worst of all exiles, the exile from oneself. This Communism was not the luminous world of which he had sung the praises, "the simple thing which is complicated to do". Instead, it was an auto-referential system of power which soon revealed its obtuse nature. When, following the Berlin workers' uprising of 1953, the Communist party of Eastern Germany declared itself dissapointed by it, Brecht wrote the following: since the party was dissapointed by the people, it would be necessary to dissolve the people and to found another. Keuner is, in a certain measure, a Brecht in exile from his own certainties, who imparts instructions in order to help us keep afloat in an era in which everything is losing its sense. For this reason, some critics have notices the temptation for Brecht's Keuner feels to cross over into the territories of Kafka's Keuner. And not only because of the parable form and brevity of the stories. In this landscape of exile from sense, Keuner's instructions are incredibly up-to-date for us, who at the turn of the milenium have lost all sense and float in the current of a moral void whose source is unknown to us and whose outlet is not yet apparent. Keuner inspired us to place the piece in the setting of an exhibit of "artistic" artifacts, in the disorderly fashion of certain expositions of our time, dominated by virtuality, in which the fragments of reality are an exile without hope. In this consists the agonizing beauty of artistic procedures in our time, in the paradox of emotional reality desperately trying not to dissapear into the black hole of virtuality. In a visual installation appear the dramatis personae of our time, each representing themselves; they recite Keuner's words in a vain effort to find at least an echo of moral self-legitimacy. The artifacts of reality to which we cling in our exile are: a musical band in disguise; a Brechtian chanteuse; an art lover from the Russian mafia; a Kantorian actor in the form of a manikin, orphaned from his own theatre and forced to repeat the memory of himself as part of an impossible to replicate work of art; an ancient Socialist art museum custodian who's survived the fall, and lastly, an artistoid/intellectualoid curator of exhibits who cultivates a Kafkian brand of Jewishness and is trying to make impossible sense out of the exihbit he's been called to organize, and the result of which is inevitably post-moral. Moni Ovadia |