The wall

Dramatic chronicle of a civilized apartheid

The piece is part of a longer work entitled “Esercizi di prosa danzabile.” A special, shortened form of the performance is also available, featuring only Turi Zinna on stage, who, with laptop, keyboard and various controllers, performs and mixes the electronic score and his own voice.

The Wall is a multifocal and polysemantic performance that incorporates the elements of an epic song devoid of heroes into the form of a multimedia live set. A story by mistake recited as a 50-minute long techno song within a DJ/vj performance. The audio visual direction is handled directly on stage by the performer actor who processes his own voice live and condenses the theatrical design to himself, becoming the omnipresence and omnipotence of the individual over the whole and the detail, in the yoke of deforming spaces and sounds and weaving a sonic and gestural score in the time of listening.

Form and content require the effort to become symbol and metaphor: the overall structure of the work is inspired by the topoi of today's communication, in which word-memory-sound-image, fused in an incessant fluxus, are generators of a new space-time territory within which contemporary ordinariness has taken its seat.

As a function of this, the performer employs a frequency language, with the support of live music and video fragments, extrapolated from historical abstract films of the early 20th century (Man Ray, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann, Aldo Tambellini, Viking Eggelling).

It is the odyssey, all within his own city, of a poor barber from the popular Catanese neighborhood of San Berillo who is mistaken for someone else on the day of Mussolini's visit in 1937 and is made the object of the squadrist attentions of the local hierarchs. Forced to swallow a quart of castor oil, swollen from the beatings, he tries to return home as soon as possible to empty his bowels. But to prevent the Duce's gaze from seeing the spectacle of misery that the city's slums offered, zealous administrators had put up palisades that prevented the less affluent inhabitants from entering and leaving. The barber cannot find a hole along the barricades that would allow him to re-enter his neighborhood. Then he is forced to embark on a painful journey into the good part of town in search of a bathroom. He ends up defecating in front of the Lorenti café, the exclusive hangout of the hegemonic bourgeoisie, which rejects him by disgusting him for not being able to keep his humiliation inside. The rest of his journey continues outside the walls, between the lava rocks and the sea, in the direction of a purifying dawn.

Credits

  • Dramaturgy and Performance: Turi Zinna

  • A project by: Turi Zinna, Maria Piera Regoli, Giancarlo Trimarchi and Fabio Grasso

  • Stage layout and direction: Turi Zinna

  • Lighting design and technical direction: Aldo Ciulla

  • Production Management: Maria Piera Regoli

  • Organization: Alceste Ferrari

  • Production: Retablo

  • Photo: Giovanni Nicotra

  • In collaboration with Center Zo Contemporary Cultures and Latitudes Network

  • with the support of the Sicilian Region - Department of Tourism, Sports and Entertainment