I Cenci/Spettacolo

The Italian group Kinkaleri, which comes from Prato near Florence, is made up of six artists – Matteo Bambi, Luca Camilletti, Massimo Conti, Marco Mazzoni, Gina Monaco and Cristina Rizzo. The disciplines the six have mastered are reflected in their projects in constantly changing variations and gradations: plays, performances, installations, videos, soundtracks, stage designs, dance performances, radio plays, translations, musical compositions, publications, etc. All these creations are of a hybrid nature. In the group, all the tasks – from planning and conception through creating the dramaturgy and the performance to distribution and management – are carried out together. The members believe that for their artistic development it is essential they all maintain an overview of the whole as well as concentrating on their own creative development. Not only in Italy but throughout Europe (and elsewhere?) they are regarded as one of the most important experimental groups of the new generation in both performance and art. Founded in 1995, Kinkaleri presents itself as a kind of emporium, as ‘an open container for a whole series of activities’. After all, in Serbo-Croat the word Kinkaleri means a collection of knickknacks, an emporium, a department store where one can find the most diverse objects.

At the Kaaitheater Kinkaleri will present three separate performances which together form a trilogy.

They describe My Love For You Will Never Die as a place, a landscape, a country that exudes peace and gentleness and transmits this to the audience. It is a performance that is like being plunged into a Turkish bath with the audience enveloped in mist, warmth and humidity. In this setting the audience is given the time to examine each object down to the very last detail. It is a time for the eyes and for objects. In the end it is as if the objects are looking back at us. The performance is not dedicated to anyone in particular. 

On the other hand, can be regarded as a vacuum: it is a place to stay and wait. There is no story. Some of the material for this performance was taken from Louis Wolfson’s second book, Ma mère, musicienne, est morte de maladie maligne au milieu du mois de mai mille977 au Mémorial à Manhattan, based on notes bequeathed by his mother. Louis Wolfson is a schizophrenic living in New York: on the basis of his first book, L étudiant en langue aliéné, Gerardjan Rijnders made his memorable performance Wolfson, de talenstudent in 1985. Wolfson developed apocalyptic ideas that would make it possible to end life on earth: a ‘final point to a hell of a planet’. As in the mind of all schizophrenics, where the ego and the world are one, in an image is created of a world that coincides with the person looking at it. Viewer and viewed merge together, so that every form of  display in the theatre is immediately questioned. 

The title I Cenci/Spettacolo obviously refers to Les Cenci, the lost play by Antonin Artaud. Kinkaleri is not so much interested in Artaud’s life or madness, or in his writings for and about theatre, as in ‘the cultural conditions of acceptance demonstrated by Artaud’s work’. What interests them most is the utopian, existential and philosophical tension between a maker and his work, in the ‘dissociation of the soul-animal and death’. As in all Kinkaleri’s performances this too is about theatre as a place to investigate and what, with its level of ‘live performance’, it can still signify in a world dominated by the image, representation and reproduction. In Kinkaleri’s political approach to the role its work plays in today’s world, the indefinability of theatre, its ‘pointlessness’, may well be its ‘ultimate, final necessity’.