Tag: Matteo Lanfranchi

BLOG – SOME REMARKS – THE SRI LANKA TRIP

(3.11.2018, Dubai ARPT)

It’s almost seven o’clock in the morning and me sitting with a cup of coffee at the airport in Dubai waiting for my connection to Colombo feels a bit like a dream. Not only because it’s just 4 am in my home country but also because I didn’t have enough time to get used to the fact that I am actually going to participate in this project until I did really land here.

My sleepy mind is full of thoughts, which circulate around the project itself, its contents, its sense as well as around the idea of all my new colleagues, the new and unknown environment of the country that I am about to spend the next six weeks in, these all mix with the people I left behind, the country and the mondaine reality that occupied my mind until now.

I somehow find it quite useful to examine my current idea of what to project might look like and how it will actually function so that I can store my state of mind for future comparison with the reality of the project as it will develop in the close future.

I am still very hesitant about my part of this whole thing. As I normally work as some kind of catalyst of projects, which is partly the content of my position as a dramaturge, it shows to be quite difficult for me to become more involved in a thing that I do not know how to catalyse yet. Yet I am full of some expectations of the result, which in my fantasies is a site-specific very reactive and seductive piece of art. Theatre that will rise from our direct experience with Sri Lankan spirit, genius loci as well as genius populi so to speak.

But I am also used to be the one who searches for information and helps the director to choose from the materials available for the topic ort he form. Yet here I am also helpless, for I do not know much about the topic yet, neither the form, because those are all things to be discovered during the process of creation.

I find myself in a state of readyness to explore and express my emotions and associations with places and situations that are about to come and to connect them to the others experiences and emotional processes as I have just come back from my psychoanalytical training which will probably very distinctively influence my whole stay in Sri Lanka and my viewpoint on our work.

I am very eager to explore the ways that Sri Lankan people experience their lives, what is important to them and how their worldview is being established. For that I have grown more and more secure in using the exploration of tales, stories and child bringing up. One of my main interest lies in the way mother-father roles establish and work and what it means to be a mother in Sri Lanka, what it means to be a wife, daughter or and also what it means to be an artist. I am aware of the fact that it will be very difficult to explore and understand these concepts in such a short period of time that we have for doing so yet I do believe in the power of art and self-experience that could at less open the door to this problem and maybe even enable us to enter.

Hikkaduwa, 4.11. 14:18

After having had a wonderful evening with my new colleagues and mates I had a wonderful morning swim in the ocean – learning my first lesson: never swim with your sunglasses on, the first wave coming is going to ease you of those. I can relate to this moment also on a symbolic level – I cannot claim all my preconceptions are gone, but I could maybe say that this moment symbolically made me more open and more aware of me being actually here and what it means to me.

I realised that I am about to join this amazing group of people dealing with issues that interest us all, trying to figure out the arguments that we all have for or against some problem. And they are going to be very personal. I now fully feel that this kind of work is what I love but also what is very difficult for me and can even be harmful and I am constantly thinking how do I stay in this personally and emotionally and authentically involved without being harmed or without going to bed with unavoidable thoughts. As if I couldn’t stay in this and out of it at the same time. This ambiguity seems to be a big task for me here. Finding a way to work and to create without being destroyed by it.

And as a matter of fact, the topic we all agreed to explore is boundaries, which perfectly fits my mind set – what kind of boundaries and borders we build? do we protect them? How? Where do these boundaries come from? Wy do we need them? How do they serve us and how do we serve them?

These and many others are the questions to be explicated and “unpacked” to quote one the local artists.

SUN BEACH HOTEL 5.11. 16:46

A PHOTO POEM

Catching drops of ideas,

straggly thoughts,

opening topics,

breaking branches of prejudices,

leading work-line,

an owlet moth of direction,

network of concepts.

A portal to the residency.

A wondering brick elephant.

Today’s visit of the residency space was lead by my need to tidy up my ideas which was found in all the wonderful natural as well as human-made artefacts. All the little scene I encountered with turned into abstract tasks which in the following days I shall make more tangible. At the moment I find the idea of being in the state of a wondering elephant very inspiring.

Aneta Fodorová is an emerging dramaturge based in Prague, Czech Republic. Her philosophical and psychoanalytical educational background with the mixture of physical and alternative poetic theatre has lead her to found new theatre company MAREATE, which she runs with her colleague and close friend Lucie Palonciová. Her most recent work as dramaturge includes a collaboration with Czech alternative theatre company Chemical Theatre. The topics that her interests now revolve around are; humanity and aggression, uniqueness, creativity as a medication and most recently the exploration of what the modern hero looks like.

Trained in academic writing, Fodorová has always had passion for creative writing, exploring, subverting the formal narrative. Trained as a dancer at a local art school she then continued her physical performance training with Loco:motion Company, Prague. From the position of a performer she quite consciously moved to the position of dramaturge and script writer.

Fodorová developed her writing skills with the help of Czech actor and director Jan Lepšík. Alongside collaborating with Chemical Theatre and running her new company Fodorová also writes short historical stories for children and teaches psychology.

This is my third time in Sri Lanka: in 2014 I travelled through the country as a tourist, in 2015 I was invited as an artist to the Suramedura residency, and now I’m here to direct the Snowball Effect residency. We have 6 weeks to deliver a show, a format, that can also travel to Europe. The starting point is pretty big: identity, family, us vs. them. On the 3rd and 4th of November, I held a workshop to all the artists involved to create common ground and a starting point. I proposed some of the activities that I use with my company, Effetto Larsen, to investigate topics with the public and to involve them in our artistic processes.

We started working on identity: what we think makes us who we are, what we feel close to and what we feel distant from, what moves us, what is important and meaningful for us. Divided into groups, we then played a game inventing 3 communities, each with social rules, language, songs, ethical principles, and rituals. We had good fun and it triggered interesting thoughts. We ended the first day with a game I normally use to create clusters: someone asks a question out loud, and then the participants can reply choosing a position in the room, where one side means yes and the other no. We laughed a lot and discovered that most of us share the same ideas and principles. I like the moments when the group is split in two because it always feels like a little revelation.  The second day I proposed working on our family connections, thinking about them as constellations and networks, and asking what could put them in danger or threaten them. What emerged was the need to preserve communication to keep the relationships alive and healthy. None of us perceived our families as physically in danger or exposed to particular threats. We ended the day talking about the whole process and choosing some focus points and topics for each of us to work on.

This residency is challenging and stimulating. We have to produce a show, we are a big group, some of the artists involved can only join us for the last week, we have very different backgrounds and we need to deliver something that can work for any kind of audience, e.g. city, village, South East Asian or European. I envisage inviting audiences to play a game where they will be divided into groups and be lead through different activities to eventually become a community. We are making a step forward every day in creating something flexible enough to merge with proposals by local artists that we are working with. My goal is to produce a simple format, which will we reach as a result of a ‘sedimentation’ process.

Identity & Movement
PERSONAL : LOCAL : REGIONAL : NATIONAL : GLOBAL

An IN SITU production Co-produced by UZ Arts (Scotland), Atelier 231 (France), La Strada Graz (Austria), Ctyri Dny (Czech Republic), Festival di Terni (Italy

Devised at Sura Medura by Matteo Lanfranci (Italy) and Neil Butler (Scotland) with Fabrice Depprois – Visual Artist (France), Aneta Fodorová – Performer, Dramaturge (Czech Republic), Florent Mehmeti – Performer/writer (Kosovo), Sita Pieraccini – Performer/Musician (Scotland), Zephyr Liddell – Sculpture/Costume (Scotland), Dave House – Sound Artist (Scotland) with Sri Lankan artists and performers.

Drawing upon Matteo Lanfranchi’s, “Mnemosyne Emotional maps” developed at Sura Medura and Stormo (Flock) an exploration of the movement of birds.

To be performed in Sri Lanka on 7-9^th December 2018 and re-imagined in the UK, France, Austria, Italy and the Czech Republic in 2019/20 – adapting to each socio-political environment, accumulating momentum, artists, performers and the public.

STORMO/Flusso @Assab One 2017 from Effetto Larsen on Vimeo.