Instabili Vaganti and theatre as a window onto the world
Anna Dora Dorno and Nicola Pianzola, founders of the theatre company Instabili Vaganti, are really ‘tireless’ and fertile in their creative research and experimental work.
They are now engaged in a “utopian experiment of artistic global sharing”: the project Beyond Borders, subtitled “theatre as a window onto the world”.
Conceived during the lockdown, the project is an innovative, authentic, and ‘fluid’ answer to the crisis affecting the world of culture – and performing arts, in particular – due to the restrictions and measures implemented to combat the pandemic.
The project is developed through remote meetings and creative work sessions on online platforms, and artists, dramatists, performers, musicians are involved following a working method the company has acquired in more than fifteen years of experience in the direction of international projects.
Beyon Border combines web contents (video-performances, talks, workshops, shows) with activities that will be staged live, once allowed.
The works created to date have involved artists and institutions from Iran, Turkey, United States, and projects of new works with artists from European and South American countries are currently underway.
The different co-operations/shares range from direction to concept, from acting to writing texts, from creating original music to video shooting, besides the support for production.
8 1⁄2 Theatre Clips: How the pandemic changed our lives is a theatre-series in eight and half episodes made with the Iranian Don Quixotte theatre company, in collaboration with and the support by the Embassy of Italy in Teheran. It premiered in August and is going on until December.
The video-performance TIME, a “reflection on the sound of Absence”, involved Turkish artists Fatih Genckal and Cansu Pelin Isbilen. Co-produced by the Italian Cultural Institute in Istanbul, it has been simultaneously presented on each other’s social channels during the 'Festival PerformAzioni' of Bologna.
SAIL, a "collaboration through video" between Anna Dora Dorno, Nicola Pianzola, and American performer Cecilia Seaward, also co-producer with Instabili Vaganti, debuted at ‘Burning Man 2020’.
The company keeps on working on the series 8 1⁄2 Theatre Clips, written and directed by Anna Dora Dorno in co-operation with Iranian director Ali Shams and performed by Dorno herself, Nicola Pianzola, and Danial Kheirkhah. Three of the eight planned episodes were produced: Beyond the mirror, The Night Shift, The notes of Absence (the last, first broadcast on September 30).
As we read in the director’s notes, it is freely inspired by Fellini’s masterpiece: «the movie is set in a situation of seclusion, of isolation from the outside world, and the protagonist is unable to carry out his work, as the days go by and true facts, memories and phantasies overlap more and more, until they are undistinguishable. A condition similar to the one we all lived during the lockdown».
The separate episodes of the series investigate the themes of awaiting, fear, boredom, dream, the new social relations, the return to the cities, freedom after the lockdown, in “a theatrical transposition of the domestic scenes” that characterized and are still characterizing this difficult moment of our history we are living worldwide, which is observed and represented with the approach, though the eyes, and by the artistic sensibility of interpreters from different cultures.
An ‘experiment’ with new forms of expression, techniques, and creative processes that becomes not only a ‘document’ on our new sociality but also "theatre as a window onto the world".
329.29 KB)The works:
- Beyond the mirror – I episode of 8½ Theatre Clips
- The Night Shift – II episode of 8½ Theatre Clips
- The notes of Absence – III episode of 8½ Theatre Clips
- TIME
- SAIL