With Angeli di Luce, it was a matter of going ahead: we had to solve a series of problems, take new decisions and put into reality others already made. So by and by this led to choosing the revelation topic which proved to be the most suitable for a continuation along the same staging guidelines we had stuck to in the past years. Therefore, after Eneide it was not a question of looking for a defined work of fiction, it was rather a question for finding a topic important enough, through which it could be possible to create a script of atmosphere, of feelings, and of discussing this topic through an electronic technique - both in the stage set and in the project's language.
The Book of the Apocalypse analyzed rather in the sense of revelation, of disclosure rather than of fiction, inevitably required theoretical research work, due to find in contemporarily the necessary references for understanding the "condition". The state of mind that must be attained prior to be able to cope with such complexe a topic. In this sense, the literary and theoretic references between Henry Michaux's halluciantory status and Peter Handke's prophesizing writing, from Edmond Jabes' questionings to Benjamin's Angelus Novus contributed to trace the course of the play.
Angeli di Luce slowly takes shape in an environmental atmosphere that could be an underground shelter for men out of time, but -also an absolute space where dimensions are recognizable only through faint light rays and through fragments of bodies and objects. Two hands moving in a mud pool right during the moment when the Human detaches itself from its original matter. A book given as the revelation of knowledge, of writing, and a mouth that devours the paper, symbolizing sufferings and simultaneously the ecstasy of the book containing the beginning and the end. These are fragments existing within the confined space of a hallucinatory condition, where dreams as well as reality may begin.
This is apparently a rather abstract indication through which we gradually approach Angeli di Luce's voyage.
Gradually the initial fragmentary atmosphere seems to attempt, to recompose itself in that kind of darkness, where you cannot see with your eyes, but with your mind. A darkness rushing to become light, a dazzling light. Terrorized, squeezed against a shutter, emits a fastidious, a real sound - as does a town when awakening.
The person is terrified by reality and enters into the infinity of dreams; space is revealed to him in the instant of creation, light geometries, as in a fast metamorphosis, revealing the stone. Three rocks of a magic colour slowly unfold as to become a book unconcealing the light - and once again are hurled into that infinite space, where shapes may envolve and grow up into a structure, permitting access to knowledge. From the gold of the alchemists to the constellations of infinity, everything fails apart, just to show its real identity. No shape is permanent and everything happens in response to a continuous, endless process. Men wanders through space as a defenceless mass, sometimes as a multiplication of one and the same being, sometimes as the personification of a mere "monstruosity".
Just like the shapes hitherto presented as images space as a surface does not persist, it breaks apart to reveal a greater depth and multiplying directions.
Out of the confused geometry the bodies slowly reach a more systematic status, comprehensible as a shape but not as a subject. They dance, facing a pulsating sun that generates life and leads back to reality, a confused reality where communication is uncertain and where the past is referred to in a status of a total hallucinatory vertigo. Here the journey towards the light becomes more intense, and the men - carried away by extraordinary magic - devour the light, the revelation: " ... and I took the booklet from the angel's hand and I swallowed it. It tastet sweet like honey but when I had swallowed it, my stomach turned very bitter."
The laser is used as the perfect synthesis of light, as writing and as the Verb, as a line that starts from Earth and is lost in the infinite. The light transporting microscopic particles of energy to become a possible new language. A new energy involves the bodies that are catapulted into a status where the "perspective" seems to materialize in a continuous dissolution and re-creation of space. Where the concepts of dimension and duration become arbitrary, where space and time are indecipherable, something extraordinary may happen, anything can happen.
Giancarlo Canteruccio
