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Aurora Elettronica
AURORA ELETTRONICA In this place we do not want to talk of our theatre/architecture project realized for Ars Electronica 86 in a descriptive manner, we rather prefer that it be read and understood in the moment the event occurs, without any anticipation. This is because we are every time fascinated by the possibility of having the events approach the pre-selected space as "unexpected", as surprising gestures, as an unusual atmosphere.
On the other hand it is surely necessary to give some elements, a basis to start from. Thus we invited the art critic Pierluigi Tazzi—who knows our work from the beginning—to write a short essay about the historical background out of which our artistic working has arisen.
In fact, the following short script presents a survey of the theatrical phenomena we always refer to when trying to propose a new language, shifting our attention towards the future, well aware of the fact that this will not be possible without a knowledge of history, without training and the experience of the past.
AURORA thus presents a condition of an overall event, where nothing is given as a simple pull of sensory stimulation, but the whole event is rather structured as an oscillation to be lived within, being at the same time a scenario unattached to the spectator as well as an active container involving the spectator and making him become part of the event.
May all that show the general topic of transformation, of metamorphosis, through which this project has been realized.
Pina IzziPIER LUIGI TAZZI
"I have always made theatre, sometimes without knowing, therefore I do not love it, but I will continue doing so up to the limits of the conscience."
P.L.T., H, 1979 (unpublished) I.
The theatre is a place of an overall and total representation of the body. All the capacities and potentials of the body are utilized and emphasized in the "sacred" space of the scene, as well as its limits and imperfections. The body is aware of its limits (hence the satiric genre), of the proper goals (comedy) and of its own death (tragedy) and through an appropriately stabilized rite we are able to confine this awareness into the timeless space of the stage.
For a short period this will be the narrated and narrating body of the "bourgeois" theatre, it will be the receptive and expressive body of the post-artaudian theatre as well. But theatre includes another component, too, which has not taken its proper motivation from the depths of human culture, but finds its justification rather on the level of the social practices of the species, and this is the spectacular. Spectacular is, in short terms, displaying in an appropriately adapted space a series of signals carrying multifacet meanings in common, the overall consideration of which leads to an overall content that absorbs the singular meanings. MANIFESTATION is implied in the spectacular, as an act of showing and being shown, of seeing and being seen, a peremptory act of exhibition, of aggression (above all visual, but even the other senses may be addressed) towards a qualitatively as well as quantitatively indifferent group of recipients to whom the message is addressed. Exhibitionism and voyeurism have to do with the spectacular. The other substantial implications of the spectacular is SPACE understood as defined area, as environmental context preestablished for the MANIFESTATION. Western civilization and culture, however, have put spectacle and representation in a line, often using them as synonyms. As a matter of fact, one could forward the idea of a distinction: REPRESENTATIVE (painting, text, photography, images in motion, etc.) is everything that leads back to a reality, the flux of which is blocked in a significant "instant" at its agents' choice, the latter being defined as the TECHNIQUES OF REPRESENTATION. SPECTACULAR is a reality by itself which might include representative elements, but the flux of which is not free, but rather inserted into spatial-temporal parameters, sometimes elastic, anyway prestabilized by its agents that might be defined as the SPECTACULAR ARTIFACTS. The problem becomes more complicated when we consider the so-called SPECTACLES IN NATURE, for which no intentional agent appears (a sunset, a storm above the sea, the eruption of a volcano surely are spectacular events!). One could add this type of consideration: The spectacle in Nature is only such if the event is watched but not experienced. Generalizing, we might say that a spectacle is such only if viewed by a spectator. A spectacle ends in the moment when the spectator renounces his role of watching—and starts entering and being a part of the event:
For the shipwrecked the tempest will have other than spectacular values! The "spectaculum" thus implies the attitude and the presence of a spectator. Between the event and the person(s) assisting in the event there is a caesura, a diaphragm, a window (as Leon Battista Alberti would say) that insulates by the help of a film (of more or less density and a higher or lower permeability) him who watches, from the event he is watching.
In modern western civilization, thus, the theatre presents the following two fundamental components:
space of the body and spectacular space.
On one hand what you feel and the feelings of which are communicated, on the other what you watch without participating.
The body by itself has an insuppressible reality, and the reasons of the body are indisputable and hence absolute:
desire, pleasure, disappointment, tending, towards, expanding into, fleeing from, aspiring, enjoying, suffering … Each of these states implies a new, unseen event. The reproduction and thus communication of one of these events implies proposing something completely or partially new, something that was not there before—but is now.
On the other hand, the spectacular must have a proper obvious evidence, and this can be discussed every single time, and is thus relative, succeptible to being submitted to a scale of values, measurable in some way through the audience's reception. This further implies that the spectacular event in all or in part of its elements be known, be the outcome of a repetition. In order to be effective, the spectacular must already be notorius or recognizable, something must come back.
II.
In the history of western culture we see moments when the spectacular prevails over the body.
THE RENAISSANCE SCENE IN ITALY
The invention of perspective is something of a prelude to the innovation of theatrical scenography. The definition of the space as represented, operated by the perspective, leads to the definition of scenic space as a unitary space. Staging techniques evolve quickly in this sense and give way to the birth of the FOURTH WALL: for the first time a neat separation between real space and the space of the scenic illusion is created. Representation and spectacle are reunited in the illusionary space of the settings.
THE BAROQUE THEATRE
The illusionistic stressing upon perspective effects pushes toward the unrepeatable adventure of the infinite, conceived and understood as an endless space wherein any architectural effort is dissolved. The theatre thus assumes the quality of a phantasmagorical setting, encircling every wonderful extravaganza. The results are an immediate visual amusement, of intense exterior emotion and of a collective and fantastic illusion.
MEYERHOLD
The machine does not construct the scene but penetrates it. The illusionary image created by the scenic machinery is substituted by a new conception of scenic space in which each element—including the actor -is not in the function of the illusion, does not postpone matters to a different reality, but celebrates itself, the proper insuppressible presence. Technology-oriented constructivism celebrates the material substance of a mechanical society. Through diminishing the existence of playfulness in the work, a positive relationship between man and machine is prefigured. Through the planification of mechanization the mass-man may be drawn into a collective workfeast. The construction of life takes place in a completely planned urban universe, although "freed" from its own planning. Scenic mechanism is married to bio-mechanical acrobatics. The town enters the theatre in which it realizes itself through an assembly of attractions. To the purely visual stimuli of the baroque theatre are added the nervous stimulations of the constructivist theatre. The contradictory images of technology are matched—though not counteracted—by the utopia of the realm of machines as liberators.
THE BAUHAUS THEATRE
The Bauhaus project tries to lead us to a new union of what seemed dispersed in the constructivist utopia. A new idea of totality is imposed: the total project, i.e. a project capable of including in itself the totality of reality.
Such was seen as a function by Moholy-Nagy, as destiny by Schlemmer, as construction by Gropius.
To Moholy-Nagy the theatre, the arts, the cinema—the creative artist beyond specification of a proper field of work—is given the task of organizing the inhomogeneous material of urban reality. After positioning several emitting structures that interfere and superpose each other, it is just a matter of finding a new sense that will no longer be the one of the humanistic vision, but neither the non-sense of the polivalent technological image. It is rather a concept of a Theatre of Totality as a productive confluence of the fragments that thus are resolved in a new unity founded upon the spectacular. Schlemmer, in his turn, takes Man off the stage, either by shifting him towards the control panel as the total commander controlling the "eyes feast", or by elevating him beyond himself like Angelus Novus, both god and a puppet in a show at the same time, a sublime mechanism of high precision. Theatre as the fair of attractions for a new infancy of humanity and simultaneously sublimation of itself, of the proper unspeakable reality. "No separation between the space of the spectacle and the space of life can exist: Schlemmer's pantomime is nothing but the 'shaping up' of the real relation between man and space within the technological universe." (1)
Gropius feels the necessity of reconducting the theatre towards a constructed space, distinct from though integrated into the enveloping reality. His TOTALTHEATER propones itself as the global alternative to the real, as the ideal counter-city, separated and controlled territory floating luckily on the uncontrolled and fluid chaos of a technologically determined and controlled reality. But at this point he is not aware of the fact that "Utopia does no longer live in town, and neither does its spectacular metaphor, if not as a game or a productive structure dressed up as imaginary." (2)
III.
If the machine worlds the vanguard artists found themselves confronted with took the figure of the Art Director as an ASSEMBLER whose task it was to make the scenic machinery work,the theatre being but the latter, the Director's responsibility was "creativity" like God's, only responsible for the world's machinery and not merely its inventor. With the evolution of technology Man will go into liquidation in the moment when the STANDARD ACCURACY of industrial production, i.e. of the "tout court" production sets Man free from the spectacular by handing the theatre back to the body: we are at Artaud's.
In any case, the spectacle (to be clearly distinguished from "show") goes on. Technology becomes spectacular outside the limited enclosures of the theatrical scenery and, projected into the larger scenery of the metropolis, fills up the whole surface of the planet by itself, in a sort of a realistic totality but no more under the dominance of Man.
The artistic practices and the objects produced, mass media and informations are numerous mirrors reflecting—no longer in the uniqueness of the renaissance scene but well in the fragmentation of their specificness—the great metropolitan and technological spectacle, its wonders, phantasmagories, the super-posed, ephemere, fast-paced appearance of likeliness.
Telematics and television have accentuated this sort of splitting up, profaning any place, depriving every space of its sacredness and revealing to the subject, to the individual in the solitary mass, the mirror/filter of the imaginary.
The theatre, thus, establishing itself within the history of modern culture as a projectation and invention work, puts body and spectacle in a conflicting situation. The spectacle attacks the body, stings it, hurts it, wounds it, humiliates it. The body, on the other hand, becomes spectacular: the Star.
But the world is far away, is drifting away in a proper immaterial substance: light, appearance, energy. The relations dematerialize, lose their concreteness. The apparition of objects is constituted and declared to be ephemerical: Duration and eternity elide into each other, lose each other, get lost, vanish. Everything becomes indirect. Intermediaries between subject and reality are established. Which reality? The one that still slices up and determines existence: Life and death, desire and joy, satisfaction of needs and realization of desires, impulses and stimuli. The universe of reality and the stimulated universe run parallel. Indistinguishable?
The theatre: how can the place of simulation and travesty compete with a simulated universe and get away with it? The theatre is the antique place of simulation of the real, of things that ARE and of things that ARE NOT, together and at the same time. But it the relation to reality is more and more often established through simulated models, will the theatrical simulation that simulated the relation of the subject with reality, with the other that simulated reality, will this simulation become the simulation of a simulation? Or will it be method, a trace of the reception of an already written essay about something that is already the staging of a simulated model that guarantees conformity to the phenomenon that is just substituted.
The void that used to exist in humanistic culture between mental representation and reality, between idea and fragment, is now topped by the informational simulation, by the hybrid of image and object. So new combinations between visual aspects of reality, conscience and action are established.
Either this hybridization will be the basis of a future hypothesis of the theatre—or else it will disappear in it. Anyhow, it will no longer be the relation between body/subject and machine-spectacular/technology, but rather something different, something in fact hybrid that flows through the two antique terms of this relation without opposing them dialectically and finally mutes it. And by muting it uproots the traditional apparatus—from the Renaissance to the Bauhaus, from the classical theatre to Artaud's or Grotowsky's body theatre—and builds other foundations, produces other shiftings, invents other goals.GIANCARLO CAUTERUCCIO
"AURORA ELETTRONICA"
Notes for a scenic script Darkness. In one corner of the square a strange noise is heard, the noise of a primordial magma flux, dynamicized by an unknown power producing a vibration on the square's surface. By and by the sound spreads out until it reaches other points of the square, finally covering it all.
Three sparks of intermittent light start running up through the air until they reach three points of the elevated parts of the buildings circumferencing the square, buildings that are not yet introduced into the event's structure. The sound, through almost imperceptible variations, assumes a more comprehensive rhythmical shape, memories of ancient civilizations, signs of time.
The three sparks reach three points high in space which explode at first contact as if to set in motion an enormous engine composed of micro-mechanisms, determining micro-explosions. The sound explodes, is dissolved to be re-composed in more evolved forms.
A series of visions appears on the vertical surfaces of the place, they are abstract signs slowly transforming: points—lines—shapes (vertical—horizontal—surface—three-dimensional), archetypical signs of architecture, inedited scripts still indecipherable. The signs tell about time, the architecture tells about its time, the visions are immediate and fleeting, are overlaying each other. They write in the darkness, crushing the silence of space, slowly filling up emptiness, an endless melody of now and then.
A bird, an Icarus, an airplane, still cryptic, fly on the surfaces, appearing and disappearing, becoming synthesis through an arrow of light, the comprehensible indicator of direction. The arrow is gently travelling towards endless spaces and leads our sight towards long forgotten memories. The men until now huddled stand up slowly as after a long sleep.
The breath of the bodies slowly moves to the air.
Decipherable and indecipherable words float on the track of an electric wind that models and structures them.
Blades of laser light unexpectedly, take the breath, turn over the levels of spatial perception and lead the dialogues of the people. The slow movements of the light rays pervade the darkness like gigantic serpents in the depth of immense seas. Their trails lead to the infinite, immersed in a chorus coming more and more to the foreground. Stripes of white light top each other and uninterruptedly search for elements, stopping on some details.
In fact, the sound generates an enormous explosion, as if the terrestrian surface is to be cracked.
Like in magic, from the surface of each a gigantic structure starts growing through the light. A structure whose top is directed towards the skies.
THE PYRAMID. A mythological symbol, a monument of past and future, being an ageless archetype. The giant, through its emersion, generates the light and the energy. The town starts dancing, the facades start talking to each other, inside and outside melt in a unifying poetical moment.
The lasers set up a roof of light, as if they wanted to make the square an intimate area. Silver men penetrate the square and speak through a magical pulsation of light.
Images appear on the surfaces, disrupting the composing structures on one side, and indicating the future on the other by proposing memories. The lasers construct dances of geometry.
The windows of one building are lighted from the inside like an computerized panel, suggesting infinite combinations. The domestic interiors join the game of total space by letting themselves be penetrated by the exterior elements.
The voices of men are clear, they can communicate the ideas amalgamating the behaviours, reconquering space and time. People who have acted until know on the lateral structures now move with discrete slowness towards the pyramid of light, watch the latter's top with the desire of reaching it, of gaining control over it.
Other men reach the bottom of the palace's facade and quickly start climbing up with the idea of running along a vertical surface. The pyramid and the palace are conquered by the people of a new era. The light reveals completely the structures of the square, redesigning the morphological dynamics. Borders between the real and the imaginary are torn down.
People are dancing in total harmony, rhythm is endless, revolution of space is already going on.
Electronic technology, with its speed, its fascination, its expressive physicality, its language has written on the walls of time, has told an endless story in an instant of time.
Space and time have completed their metamorphosis.TONI VERITÀ
"METAMORPHOSIS"
Nine movements by an art director on his quest for the light FIRST MOVEMENT
A pale winter sun enlightens the indicated place. He wakes up somewhat before seven, sure that no one observes him. Instead of getting up he stays in bed. Not easy for him to keep his eyes open just to pick up her eyes searching for his. With his eyes closed he sees the icy waters of the Danube. And however much he tries to see, something mythic ends up resisting him as the last trace of an invisible value to which both reason and emotion try to refer to at the same place and time. Now while her eyes run over the emptiness of the hotel room he feels that the attitude of watching the environment of things through a crystal prisma is the motive for the discovery that all around there is but the colour of the iris.
SECOND MOVEMENT
In the summertime they burn the stubbles in the fields, in the land where he is born, and with ancient methods the rows of flames advance towards the houses without ever reaching them, for a moment they make us tremble, make us think of the faggots, of the Great Fire; the wind helps them to shine and the epiphany of night, of the ardent soil, of the fire that is the feast of the stone that changes its colour. In winter it is difficult for him to distinguish between natural and artificial landscape because the horizon of events never closes on itself. Just as if its waves were altogether visual circuits organized by the necessity of reaching the objects and of moving among them in the process of becoming a past and present story, in the fear that everything might flee without leaving a trace among the figures waiting for an encounter.
THIRD MOVEMENT
He lives in a frank area where technology proposes itself as the intertwinement of artifice and the artificial. Ideally the circumstanding objects position themselves in a non-temporal period somewhere between the present and the utopic, near enough to be producible, but far enough to push it into inventive hazards. This is why he feels at ease in this frank area, although the objects communicate to him a slight excitement referring to the times when Greta Garbo said in Vienna "But why should you be attracted by a woman like myself? I am always nervous or ill … sad … or too joyful".
FOURTH MOVEMENT
His closed mouth resplends surprise. Without any valid reason he suddenly comes to the conclusion that she cheats both eye and mind. With innocence and simplicity she made the gold fever become an exorcism, an instrument of mediation on the infinite and on the fascination of his domicile. Each of her actions in theatre and—alas wish it could be cinema! Yes, for in a movie she would wrap herself into the golden drape wound up around the tree that stayed on the scene in order to testify that the drama happened. But, alas, each of her actions is only theatre. So he has to look for her in a place that is the site of rites in passing. In a place where the catastrophy has taken place and many surfaces still retain the ruins.
FIFTH MOVEMENT
He lives in what vanishes hereafter, in what is not programmed. The problem is just, whether to continue in this condition or rather not. She uses artificial material in an immaterial way, to build up distached spaces. The imagines connected to her memory are oblique rays in a sharp contrast to the shadow, the deserted places, the smells. I think the smells are the starting point of her remembrance. She uses monochromy, starting from the ideal conception which really is a world of monochromy, that all colours exist. Her way of thinking the colours derives from a conception of "uncolouring", understood as the gradual progressive extinction of the colour. She searches for something in monochromy that is not there, . . . or maybe that something is herself.
SIXTH MOVEMENT
She would like to catch his way of being, being him in her. What an idea! While the Danube freezes, continues freezing before their spirits get heated …
SEVENTH MOVEMENT
The excess of champagne has made them sentimental. They have combined themselves in a fragile game of intersections and juxtapositions as the elements of a playful surreal kit:
an example of perfect knowledge in the art of seducing.
EIGHTH MOVEMENT
Place, time, circumstances have found their proper synthesis and the encounter between him and her has taken place in a dream that visited the art director during the night, protruding its disturbing effects until the morning. During the day he wanted to evoke the kinetic and psychological perceptions of the dream. Like other times he treated the dream as a scenic script work. The script is based on the idea of being a fragment. Every thing he dreamt should take its grip on the sensorial perception. As a result of this premise was the construction of a "movie-like" construction of a series of illusory phenomena created to mimic the moving of a dream, not to conceal it.
NINTH MOVEMENT
The scene that resulted is a kind of a living theatre where one enters without particular expectations, but where you come out of with some question marks. And to these questions the spectator never will give any answer, because by now it has become important to him to stay alone, to wait for the mosaic to assemble by itself … not to force things. Awaiting her in the rigor of the coldness to announce in Linz Main Square the excesses of the passion of the town of sun.
(1)
v. M. Tafuri, "La sfera e il labirinto", Torino 1980, p. 130. back
(2)
ibidem, p. 136.back
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