Kepler‑452 at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels
Kunstenfestivaldesarts – historic international festival dedicated to contemporary theatre, dance, performing and visual arts, is in full swing in Brussels (May 11 - June 3, 2023).
Curators Daniel Blanga Gubbay and Dries Douibi affirm that this edition «can be seen as an adventurous journey into the abyss of language, exploring its ability to define or transform the present».
One of the stories chosen to ‘define the present’, is the performance by Bologna based theatre group Kepler-452 Das Kapital. A book we haven't read yet, that brings the workers occupying a factory on stage, after the collective dismissal by the GKN company in Campi Bisenzio – one of the social and political events that has brought much discussion in Italy in recent times.
One morning in the summer of 2021, 422 workers receive an email: don't come to work tomorrow, you’re fired. From that day on, the workers have occupied the factory, organizing canteen and guard shifts to prevent machinery and production from being relocated to countries with cheaper labour costs. Theatre group Kepler-452 enters the factory during one of the first solidarity meetings, while they were touring Italy to collect facts and notes for a show inspired by Karl Marx's Das Kapital, which they had decided to stage after the first lockdown. The workers invite the company to eat with them, they accept and ask if they can stay for a while, and tell about their project on Marx’s work. From that day on and for several months, Borghesi and Baraldi had lived and slept there, interviewing hundreds of workers and participating in their struggles. They had listened, observed, trying from time to time to return to Marx's pages and establish a creative dialogue between Das Kapital and what was happening in the factory, between a classic of philosophical and economic literature and a group of real persons.
Maintenance man Iorio, assembly worker Felice, and cleaning worker Tiziana are on stage with the company. They interweave their personal lives with a reflection on the life that emerges when production suddenly stops, and speaks to us about time, about who owns our time, who sells it, buys it, frees it.
The show is produced by Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT / Teatro Nazionale, which supports the company’s work since 2018, and premiered in October 2022 at VIE Festival in Bologna. It is on stage at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts thanks to the support of the Italian Cultural Institute in Brussel and the Italian Ministry of Culture (MiC).
There is great curiosity and expectation for Kepler-452: the tickets for the four performances (from May 1st to June 3rd) were quickly sold out.