poema della fine
Written in Prague in 1926 by Marina Tsvetaeva, The Poem of the End is the cry of pain after the end of love, the chronicle of emotions, thoughts, and the author’s life during the splitting period with her lover Constantin Rodzevic.
Marina writes to Constantin << If you would stay with me, you could teach me how to live in the simplest sense of this word. Without you and outside of you, I will not make it.>>
Rodzevic will abandon her.
The text is a poetic transposition of the end, which amplifies outside the personal dimension of the individual and spills over until it acquires a fatalist and apocalyptic hint. The latest images impressed in Tsvetaeva’s mind, those trivial dialogues before the inevitable conclusion: an evening at the cinema, a discussion on how to act at parties, a walk between the market stalls, the smell of coffee, the lightness of his tears.
The Poem of the End is a performative work with a progressive structure: its development revolves around the fourteen chapters of Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry divided into performances that can be represented in fragments or unified.
This approach generates a structured line from a productive point of view because it alternates the research work on the missing sections with the representation of those already perfected for the audience.
Opera del Rosso’s research about Poem of the End developed focusing on the juxtaposition of a series of simple gestures repeated mechanically - to look outside of the window, to wash hands, to touch hair - added to visual plugs with symbolical connotation - a bathtub that walks quadruped, an icy and distant cyclops - creating a mélange able to translate the spectator through a boneless, soft, slimy atmosphere, typical of those timeless, suspended moments of the ending places.
This defines Opera del Rosso's work on the Poem of the End as installative and performative. From this stems the absolute importance of the site-specific component, as well as that of sound and atmospheric elements in general.
Poem of the End is designed to exist in concrete and real places - an abandoned ruin, an ancient room, a deconsecrated church, a cellar - within which, using a few specific elements - a frame, a cabinet - we manifest the poet's internal fracture in the space of action, which becomes itself the setting of the poem.
Giacomo Dominici's work on the stage component of the project starts from the translation of a given suggestion into a drawing.
This is elaborated and we start searching for things to build our elements around. We search among landfills and junk dealers, to find the corporeal incarnation of that exact imagined instrument - which exists, and has simply been forgotten: the object between eternity and rubbish. The subsequent ingenuity in mechanisms and constructions allows the birth of a spontaneous craftsmanship that draws vitality from the urgency and essentiality of a series of elements - which translate poetry into matter.
timeline
November 8 - 19, 2023
Festival Lucca Visioni, Lucca (Chapter IV)
November 17, 2023
SPAM! Rete per le Arti Contemporanee, Porcari, (Chapter IV)
August 31, 2023
Teatro delle Forche, Massafra (Chapter IV)
April 15 - 16, 2023
RomaArt Factory, Rome (Chapters I-II)
November 21 - 22, 2022
Festival Lucca Visioni, Lucca (Chapters I-II)
November 4 - 5, 2022
廢墟 Tacheles, Taipei (Chapters I-II-III)
August 5 - 6, 2022
Festival Teatro nel Bicchiere, Scansano (Chapters I-II-III)
March 26 - 27, 2022
Giornate del Fai, Scansano (Chapters I-II)
December 28 - 29, 2021
Teatro Arsenale, Milan (Chapters I-II)
credits
from Marina Tsvetaeva
adapted by Giacomo Dominici, Ian Gualdani
directed by Ian Gualdani
soundscape by Giacomo Vezzani
scenographic elements by Giacomo Dominici
with Ian Gualdani, Giacomo Dominici (Capitoli I-II-III)
Davide Arena, Emanuele Marchetti, Simone Poccia (Capitolo IV)
organization by Maria Lucia Bianchi
photos by Giulio Melani, Manuela Giusto, Simone Poccia
video by Nicola Petralia
supported by
Movimenti Artistici Trasversali
Teatro nel Bicchiere Festival
Shinehouse Theatre di Taipei
Teatro le Forche
residency programs
SPAM! Rete per le Arti Contemporanee, di Porcari
Teatro le Forche, di Massafra
廢墟 Tacheles, di Taipei
Centro Culturale Il Funaro, di Pistoia
Teatro nel Bicchiere Festival, di Scansano
GADA Centre of Contemporary Art, di Firenze
Teatro Arsenale, di Milano
special thanks to Sacha Piersanti