I wonder what it is that drives me, time after time, to tell this story of courage and of grief.
Perhaps the hope that those who listen can watch and understand the actions of human beings.
From Gita Wolf’s Antigone Parole e Sassi (Words and Stones) is a Tale-Laboratory and has a simple and bare setting, made of words and stones.
With Mariangela Celi, member for Abruzzo Region of Collettivo Antigone
Concept and dramaturgy: Renata Palminiello, Letizia Quintavalla, Patrizia Romeo, Agnese Scotti, Rosanna Sfragara
Artistic direction: Letizia Quintavalla
Distribution for Abruzzo: Arterie Ets
Antigone – the ancient story of siblings, broken pacts, rituals, unwritten laws and blind soothsayers – has been told over the centuries from the Greek poet’s play and blind soothsayers – has been told over the centuries since the Greek poet Sophocles’ play in 440 BC. Today, nineteen actresses, each in her own region and with only a small but symbolic heritage of stones, hand down this story to the new generations, who in turn will tell it to others and others and others…
Everything is accomplished as in a ritual, through a text accompanied using stone-characters and a fixed gestural score. A rectangle, marked by a trace on the floor, delimits the space of the scene. To do theatre, it is not necessary that there is a stage, instead the relationship between actor and audience is necessary. Telling the story of Antigone to the new generations, so that they can know it, remember it and tell it in their turn.
The Workshop is a sort of “second poetic navigation” where the parts are reversed: now it is the audience that acts, that speaks, now it is the children, formerly great listeners, who use the stones to tell how and in what part of them the tragic of this great story has taken refuge. Now it is the audience that constructs theatrical metaphors, and everything happens inside the classroom. The classroom is like a small polis with its own rules, where everyone knows each other, it is a small community that is nourished by a multiplicity of emotions and thoughts and a precious wealth of opinions, which is why it is a true democratic repository of knowledge.
“Words and stones” is winner of the Eolo Awards 2013 as best Creative Project.
Fragment from the “Laboratory of Words and Stones” produced by the Antigone Project Collective
Video realization by Giuseppe Ghinami and Anapì Stori