As part of the Festival International du Théâtre Professionnel 4/4, in collaboration with the Centre Des Arts Dramatiques Et Scéniques De Jendouba, on 20 March the Italian Cultural Institute of Tunis presents the show ‘L’Eremita contemporaneo. Made in Ilva’ (The Contemporary Hermit: Made in Ilva), an original piece of theatre by Anna Dora Dorno, with Nicola Pianzola.
‘Made in Ilva’ is inspired by the diary of an Ilva worker in Taranto and the testimony of some workers from the same factory. The show, which is interspersed with poetic texts by Luigi di Ruscio and Peter Shneider, tells the story of Europe’s largest steelworks. It is the result of painstaking research and experimentation, both physical and vocal, on the relationship between the body and the life in the factory. What emerges is a critique of the contemporary system of production, which transforms the human being into a machine.
To represent the unnatural nature of the movements involved in labour, the actor pushes his body to the extreme through tightrope suspensions and repetitive actions. These gestures are accompanied by obsessive rhythms and live music, in which the notes intertwine with a female voice singing orders to the actor: ‘Work! Produce! Act! Create!’. Even the stage, which made up of metal structures and made iridescent through the use of video projections, evokes the factory setting which, through alienating rhythms and distorted spaces, causes the worker to strip himself of his identity, transforming himself into a contemporary hermit, in search of an impossible salvation.
For more information, go to iictunisi.esteri.it
