"Who am I?", "Who am I?", the actors of the Great Jones Repertory Company, an American and multi-ethnic ensemble, take turns asking themselves. And that "I" that gradually emerges from the answers of Perry Yung, Zishan Ugurlu, Maura Nguyen Donahue, John Gutierrez, Valois Mickens, Eugene il Poogene, Heather Paauwe, Richard Ebihara, Valois Mickens, some Vietnamese, some South American, some Russian by origin, is rich, complex, crossed by many stories, many worlds, many horizons and landscapes.
It is not by chance that Panorama, the new show by Motus, born in New York (and American is the language of the scene), is entitled. It was created and produced by the legendary Cafe La MaMa by Ellen Stewart, where Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò, the two Motus, directors and playwrights, are loved and appreciated, considered among the most interesting artists of independent Italian theatre. Successfully presented at the New York festival "Under the Radar" last January, now debuting at the Milan festival "Fog" that co-produces it and in the autumn expected at the Romaeuropa Festival, Panorama revolves around the nine sympathetic, "lost" actors, children of migrants and refugees, or refugees themselves, with their biographies nomadic geographical and not. We talk about the mixed condition of their national identities, without borders, just like in Mldsx, the poetic show of Motus that became a cult, revealed itself to be the gender identity.
Like there, here, too, the people who tell themselves are multiple: multiple stories that cross irony and drama, travel, travel, migration, flight, drugs, sex, harassment, racism (one of the heaviest jokes is when the actor of Ugandan origin confesses that he felt black only once he arrived in the U.S.), the moonwalk by Michael Jackson and the set of "Profession reporter" by Antonioni. The techniques for presenting them are multiple - intentionally - because the actors on stage tell each other, often not in their true identity, but are also filmed by a mobile camera, or "voiced" by the films of the auditions projected on the big screen, thus superimposing narrative and visual planes.
It is clear that for Motus, one of the most "political" companies in our theatre, the interesting resonance of those multicoloured biographies is the theme of migrants, the journeys of rebirth but also the inequality and racism that ensued. With Erik Ehn they have built, in fact, a dramaturgy that goes beyond the value of individual stories, combining their own idea of theater that is not representation, but presence, is not built around a fiction but is a complex action that intersects sensations, images, suggestions, many collected here during the long stay in contact with the "landscape" of New York.
The result is very particular, difficult to say whether beautiful or ugly, exciting or monotonous. The "creative confusion" of Motus, which may seem like a mess, is actually conceived (here the New York designers of the Culturehub have collaborated) and, against the stereotypes linked to the theme of national, ethnic and geographical identity, it does not hide a corrosive intelligence that claims freedom of transition, the right to non-appearance and to our irremediably mixed condition and declares that a place that already guarantees these freedoms is there and is the theatre, the space par excellence of nomadism of the self, of multiple and complex identities, without borders and place of reception, restart, as for Perry, Zishan and the actors of the Great Jones Repertory Company was the Café La MaMa. And the great thing about it is that it makes sense, even if it's serious, all of it.
It's not theatre in theatre. If anything, it has to do with love, fascination, that irrational magic that theatre exerts on those who see it but above all on those who do it, those who cross the threshold that from here, from the real world, leads them to "who knows where". For Almost a Life (subtitle, in fact, "scenes of the Who knows where"), a delicate show of the Theatre of Tuscany, Stefano Geraci dramatist and Robert Bacci director and dramatist, have worked on the true story of Giovanna Daddi and Dario Marconcini, husband and wife, "theatrators" for more than fifty years, co-founders, always with Bacci, of the Center of Pontedera in the mid-sixties and more recently creators of unconventional programs in the small theater of Buti. The show collects their memories as an art couple and in their lives: the young man in love, she who chooses to be an actress, he who sacrifices work in his father's company fascinated by the Living and the libertarian movements...