Cristina Galbiati & Ilija Luginbühl
The game
The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.
Eutopia
The stories of the Earth have changed in nature and scale: we do not write stories to tell about the creation or the course of the world, but to avert its end.
Book is a Book is a Book
Ts'ui Pen must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occurred that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.
Nettles
At what age does one stop being an orphan? Who loses the father, let’s say at sixty, can he be defined an orphan? At ten yes – but at forty? (...)
Twilight
Choreography for the dying light
Sights
We met blind people. Some were born blind, others lost their sight over time. We asked them to tell us how they see
B
Room by room audio journey around the fairytale Snow White
.h.g.
Installation in 9 rooms, one prologue and one epilogue
Nettles
Trickster-p — Projects — Nettles
With Nettles Trickster-p invites the audience to dive into a multi-faceted experience that dialectically explores the two extremes of our human journey: childhood and death.
The childhood of Nettles is however not defined by age and rather refers to a much wider shell that symbolically and metaphorically accompanies our adult life throughout; likewise, death is not only the inevitable stopping of the vital beat, but a much sharper archetypical dimension that connects us to unknown and unsettling perspectives.
Now a common trait of their characteristic poetics, Trickster-p creates in the absence of performers and places the audience in the centre of the dramaturgical action.
Led along a path with the aid of headphones, spectators are left free to elaborate, in total solitude, the relationship to the experience of which they are witness and agent, and to directly meet the succession of environments primarily based on the transformative power of the imagination.
The voice that leads them along the journey generates associations, astonishments, mysteries, factual accounts and instances of real life experience that traverse the subtle borderline between dream and reality, memory and reflection, childhood unrest and the immanence of death.
Nettles is a listening experience to the self who is committed to revealing its own thoughts and lets flakes of autobiography and moments of great intimacy burst through the harshness of the themes and the unavoidable radical nature of the encounter with the end.
Human vulnerability is manifest in the double layer of the fragility of the body and the oneiric, mysterious life of our deepest self, and the primordiality of childhood is made concrete in the ferocity of recollections and the obsessions of memory.
Immersed in a visual and sound scape that amplifies and expands the range of possibile readings, the journey through the rooms is a physical passage that is metaphor for an intimate motion within the mind, and for a deeply emotional, compellingly human condition.
Credits
Concept and realization
Dramaturg
Simona Gonella
Voice
Cristina Galbiati (Italian version), Gabriella Sacco (English version), Dorit Ehlers (Deutsch version), Bodil Alling (Danish version)
Artistic collaboration
Yves Regenass, Mamoru Iriguchi
Soundscape
Zeno Gabaglio
Editing and mixing
Lara Persia - Lemura Recording Studio
Space realization
F.M. Scenografie srl. (Buccinasco)
IT consultancy
Roberto Mucchiut
Trainees
Gaia Bozzi, Veronica Ferrari, Martina Galbiati (NABA Scenography undergraduates) under the supervision of Francesca Guarnone
Special thanks to
Gessnerallee Zürich, NABA-Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Margherita Palli Course Leader of NABA three years Scenography degree and professor Francesca Pedrotti
Production
Trickster-p, LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura
Co-production
Teatro Sociale Bellinzona, Theater Chur, ROXY Birsfelden, TAK Theater Liechtenstein, FOG Triennale Milano Performing Arts
Supported by
Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council
DECS Repubblica e Cantone Ticino – Fondo Swisslos
Comune of Novazzano
Fachausschuss Tanz & Theater BS/BL
Percento culturale Migros
Göhner Stiftung
Landis & Gyr Stiftung
Fondazione Winterhalter
Press review
La Regione (Switzerland)
[…] An emotionally intense and dreamlike journey experienced under the all but threatening shadow of death, the absence that gives meaning to what we have present.
Theater der Dinge (Germany)
[…] Nettles, brings to play all the inconsolability of dying. The narrator’s anecdotes, reflections and dreams revolve around the irrevocability of loss, its inaccessibility and the associated urge to know: what does it mean to die, and what are the outcomes of mourning? Grief is not staged as a frontal overwhelming, not as the loud emotions of screaming and crying, but as a slow, careful circling around a loss that breaks into life as something incomprehensible. In Nettles, this incomprehensibility does not lead to a dull surrender to the absurd and the inevitable but seems rather to point to a deep connection between the enigmatic character of art and that of life.
