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The tightrope walker
Dedicated to Jean Genet
Written by Antonella Cilento
and Laura Sicignano
Direct Laura Sicignano
Coreography Piera Ravanello
Cast
JEAN Marco Pasquinucci - ABDALLAH Massimiliano
Caretta
Scenography Laura Benzi in collaboration with Iole
Cilento
Customs Maria Grazia Bisio
Video Alessandro Amaducci
Light Fabio Parodi
The show was developed after a workshop on Jean
Genet, which not only involved the Group's actors and director,
but also all the other group members: authors, choreographer, set,
costume, and light designers. The script contaminates Genet's works
with an original text. It experiments with a new type of theatre
which is created and takes place directly on the stage, and is accompanied
by dance body expression.
The TIGHTROPE WALKER by Jean Genet is a poorly known yet striking
work, which was not written for the theatre. It is a cruel declaration
of poetics and love. The tightrope walker, in his mortal loneliness,
performs absurd acrobatics, while creating a scandal with his both
vulgar and sublime costume. Genet's words are endowed with ominous
fascination, of sequins fallen onto the circus ring sawdust. Behind
this work, hides a real, even crueller story than the poetic statement
it contains.
In 1956, Genet met Abdallah Bentaga, a young Algerian man. He taught
him rope-dancing and encouraged him to succeed in this art. The
relationship however gradually weakened along with the failure of
the young tightrope walker, who finally had to give up his career
because of an injured knee. Genet's indifference to his protégé,
their project failure and loneliness drove Abdallah to commit suicide.
This suicide leads to Abdallah's sanctification, his becoming a
legend, a literary page.
Genet proceeds in creating the young man again through literature,
transfiguring him through the sacrifice of his own life. Genet brings
Abdallah's tomb on the stage, which is tomb and altar at the same
time: a sacrificed god, amid shelves, candles, votive offerings,
rotting flowersä
With words and dancing movements, two actors tell the two parallel
stories: Abdallah's story, the story of his dreary real fate of
failure, and the story of the rope-walker, an unachievable poetic
ideal that Genet wanted to realise through the flesh of his friend.
A history of relations of power within a couple, where love is not
love for the partner but for what the other represents. The rope
walker wears just shreds of his costume: the full costume in all
its striking beauty will be displayed only at the end, when the
tightrope walker is dead and only the idea of him still lingers.
The central idea on the stage is the obsession with the rope. The
rope is mixed with blood, sequins, sawdust; and then mental, confused,
baroque images bring us back to Genet's writing style through the
bi-dimensional pictures of a video. Details of bodies, statues,
illegible fragments of something which blurs in our minds, X-rays,
falling horses, burning plastics, burning words.
Against the images we have the dance: it is no illustration, but
a narration device, a geometric dance, and a very free translation
of a relationship in its development, in its psychology. Dance then
turns into violent intercourse.
The actors' rehearsals, the training sessions of the rope walker
become exercises of spiritual purification:
"out of the dross the most resplendent diamond will arise:
solitude or holiness ".
The script is created together with the show, it is composed and
decomposed during rehearsals, by contaminating Genet's original
script with the words we imagine the two lovers might have exchanged,
along the sad parable of a love which breaks out and then breaks
off along the monotonous descent to neglet and the dizzy ascent
of pitiless post mortem literary creation
During the 2000/2001 Theatre Season, the show
was put on stage in Genoa, Naples, Rome, and Turin. |
