Pic ©MasiarPasquali
Concept, Project, Video, Drone operator and Direction Paolo Panizza
Text Paolo Panizza and Agnes Oberauer
Sound Artist Jacopo Cenni
Set and Costume Designer Blandine Granier
Costume Designer Regina Celeste Braida
With Marica Mastromarino, Giacomo Toccaceli, Simone Tudda.
Thanks to Spazio NiN, Lab121 and Nau Ivanow for the artistic residencies.
The Rats project takes its name from the experiment “Universe 25” done by the ethnologist John B. Calhoun in 1973 in order to study the consequences of overpopulation.
He created a paradise able to host 3 840 rats and to furnish them unlimited food and water.
In this envirronment protected from viruses and from temperature rise and falls, without any
predator, the only factor in mortality was aging.
The ancient staying longer, the younger couldn’t access their social role anymore.
And this led to the dissolution of the social organisation and to the annhiliation of the individual through the most basic social links.
ἀποκάλυψις [-εως, ἡ], feminine noun.
Unveiling, take off a veil, manifestation, revelation.
Starting point: the experiment Universe25 as a fairytale to be told as story in a circle, as a moment of community.
A fairytale and a bit of a tale too, said by an incorporated voice outside field, which unveils, admonishes, from hope and condemnation.
Judge, like a God, guide and illustrates the rules of a game to four participants of a talent show, without ever manifesting itself.
A presenter documents and acts as a through as a messenger between God, them and the public.
Where is it? in a theater that becomes Escape room from its own constructs.
Visible walls, lights and trusses et al center a circle of white powder, bone dust, which flakes off, reduces the space of who can continue to to play. Staying out of it is equivalent to losing one’s place in this game and the show must go on.
A webcam looms over them which documents the signs of the action on the dust, sometimes cryptic, other real drawings that carry on the narration on multiple levels. The audience, a bit voyeur, observes multiple perspectives: both the frontal scene and a live bird’s eye video from a camera, projected in the background; as in a Greek choir, the audience becomes participant and inquisitor at the same time.
In this ring the voice guides them in a series of tests, concrete tasks, which leads us to discover, to reveal a moral and physical desert that advances.
In a party atmosphere, the participants left at the mercy of orders and unable to control external phenomena precipitate, disintegrate, reconcile, love and finally they die, at the fast pace of that yes, yes, yes, flag of a fake free will.
An infernal talent show in which the competitors have one goal: to adapt and survive an increasingly fastpaced society. A game of chairs that advances in rhythm sustained. Where places are few and fewer and fewer. A Russian roulette to which everyone they must and want to participate. A game that changes and reveals itself to make us manifest.
In the center? the dreams and fears of the actors. Here human beings, stripped of their being actors, who try in every way to escape from this Escape room that is the theater or that is a den insecure.
Who will win?
“On stage there are, in any case, three actors who push their technique and their bodies to the threshold of endurance: the final, infinite, anguished and programmatically spectacular, where the fate of the artist as a human being would be worth the price of the ticket alone it is the hallucinated dance of slow agony, where, if we allow ourselves the metaphor, no one has established the boundary between stage and electric chair. However, if you want (and should) pay for the ticket to see Rats, you do so by nailing yourself to see a Hunger Game that puts the watered-down versions of children’s films to shame, where the only possible prize is a – pale, distant – idea of the future.
Rather, if all goes well (and that’s not a given) some form of survival.” – Chiara Palumbo, Art a part of culture
DIRECTING NOTES
The experiment as a warning. Basis for a reality that becomes a bit of a fable and fairy tale
to tell to ourselves more than to others, the cry of alarm of one generation. The slow crumbling of the earth beneath your feet. A trial for an apocalypse in which there is no meteorite, no bomb, no typhoon, no spectacular event that puts an end to the katabasis. Apocalypse as a process, as unveiling. A film that multiplies, repeats itself within a short space of time. Souls, not characters, who inhabit a circle of white dust, bone dust of those who did not succeed. Without an arc, a real psychological evolution, you are left at the mercy of events. The only certainty? The starting conditions and the desire to make your own film-book-t-shirt in order to exist. To film this unfolding hell, there is a drone like those used nowadays. This work was the result of devising theatre, in which the text emerged from the research process. An at times provocative talent show, the voice of a deep and concrete malaise.