Rossano Baronciani
End.less
‘[...] how come that, born out of chaos, we are unable to face it ever again; we look and in our eyes
order... and shape are born”.
Witold Gombrowicz, Kosmos
workroom. It is also why studies of Claudio
Monteverdi’s 1608 opera Il ballo delle ingrate
(The Ballo of the Ungrateful Ladies)1 and an essay
by Jean Baudrillard titled Impossible Exchange
(1999) inspired an academy graduate to write
a theatrical play Senza fin.e (End.less).
The educational offer of the Urbino Academy
of Fine Arts as described in the academy
information brochure covers a full range of
professional stage qualifications, including
knowledge, competences and skills. What
the brochure does not refer to, or at least not
directly, is information about real opportunities to experiment with and imagine not
only a theatre space but also the whole world
hidden behind it. The stage design school
auditorium contains not only designing tables
and computers, coloured pencils and video
projectors but also electric saws and all sorts
of tools. In this way background painting,
costume sewing, sculpting or lighting design
are of equal importance in the stage design
A close relationship between Monteverdi’s
opera and Baudrillard’s essay, on which visualisations of settings and scenes outlined in
the play are based and which is analysed in
classes offered by the Academy, was discovered by observing that exchange between the
reality of daily life and the virtual dimenThe Ballo of the Ungrateful Ladies is Claudio Monteverdi’s
lyrical opera of 1608, based on a poem by Ottavio Rinuccini. The scene features Cupid begging his mother, Venus,
to intervene with Pluto, so that he would let ungrateful
ladies (women who scorned their lovers) return to earth
for a few hours. Then they will see what fate awaits
proud women. The theme is heavily influenced by the
Counter-Reformation. It also explains why the characters
are only mythological beings that belong to the non-real
dimension, isolated from human fates and places.
1
sion, where transfer of money, information
and all sorts of communications takes place,
is essentially impossible. Monteverdi was
forced to choose an authentic non-setting for
his opera; Baudrillard proves the impossibility of escape to other dimensions of reality
or of other potential meanings. ‘The sphere
of the real is in itself no longer exchangeable
for the sphere of the sign. As with floating
currencies, the relationship between the
two is growing undecidable, and the rate at
which they exchange increasingly random.
[…] Reality is growing increasingly technical and efficient; everything that can be
done is being done, though without any
longer meaning anything’2. Depletion of
meanings entails an uncontrolled proliferation of markers since places that seem to be
real are in fact totally conditioned by signs
J. Baudrillard, Impossible Exchage, trans. Chris Turner,
London: Verso, 2001, p. 5.
2
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Scenes from the theatrical play End.less, directed by
Erici Montorsi, Academy of Fine Arts Urbino, all photos
in the article: N. Bruschi
and symbols which are no longer comprehensible: every day someone devalues our
economy, and lends or withdraws credibility to a given company without a sensible
justification. Motivations given today will
be different tomorrow so it is impossible to
distinguish between cause and effect, or to
understand if it is really the end of the world
as we have known it, or perhaps another
worn-out forecast of the same, forever postponed, apocalypse. The starting point for Erica
Montorsi’s theatrical play is the condition of
young people to whom all opportunities seem
to be inaccessible even before they could try:
with no work, no prospects, they are blamed
for ‘a lack of experience’ and reminded that
crisis entails forced prolongation of youth,
and hence it is an endless and pointless wait.
‘An attempt to give words my bit of meaning’,
says Erica Montorsi, ‘proved unquestionably, at least to me, how important it was to
follow the ambiguous nature of the »text«.
Writing can gravitate towards description
or copying, a tendency I have opposed in an
attempt to avoid an abyss of the ending and a
static meaning. Generally speaking, I struggled with a very human impulse to start from
conclusions and to seek places where I should
only eventually get; I forced myself to do so
in order to abandon any ways or choices that
would lead to a straightforward and definite
end, choices that appealed to me with an aura
of very reassuring solidity – and yet left me
unsatisfied. Very soon the exercise brought me
relief which I found inexplicable. It seemed
fundamental to keep asking questions and to
retain the state of »ambiguity«, which permeated the whole process and seemed to be the
very essence of pursuit’.
School usually finishes here: it passes on
knowledge, and checks whether skills have
been acquired and targets accomplished. The
Academy of Fine Arts is unique in that the
process does not end there; in the school of
stage design all assignments (models, drawings and video screenings) must be realized
on stage. Chaos in the world should be put
in order in the theatre: all details, including
scale drawings of scenes, objects and video
screenings, must be assessed and realized on
stage. ‘The play tells a story of death. The
deceased appears on stage in a strange coffin.
Poor Enrico Rimasto (literally, the One Left),’
Francesco Calcagnini, senior lecturer in stage
design, comments on the staging of Senza
fin.e, ‘faces the bureaucracy of the end. It is
a comic tragedy where the wrongly deceased
is bombarded with questions by three suspicious individuals who, as we learn from the
brochure, are examiners. The first examiner
is a young woman in a red coat. She has two
black holes for eyes; perhaps she is blind as
she moves hesitantly, like a sightless person.
She welcomes poor Rimasto cordially, stroking him almost like a lover, before she heaps
on him a set of formalities that are allegedly
indispensable to certify the »deadness« that
he acquired through his demise. Amid explanations, certificates with stamp duty paid and
other documents, the spectator realizes that
a cat must have precipitated or even caused
the tragedy but the dynamics of the event do
not seem to be of importance. A silent, giant
plush he-cat appears on stage, as an enormous
caricature of the unexpected procedure. If the
first examiner spoke in the language of official
forms, the second scene is saturated with all
sorts of TV buzzwords whose meaning is hybridized. In this way a whole series of replete,
nauseating double meanings emerges’.
The third scene features a wheelchair-bound
disabled man with tattoos all over his body; he
claims to care at all for Enrico Rimasto’s fate,
thus sentencing him to an eternal present and
an endless wait.
Spatial design in the play features the
theatre auditorium divided into two sections
with a long, narrow platform resembling a
catwalk, fully covered with old, dirty and
dusty school blackboards. The curtains that
reveal and conceal the stage space are two
transparent sheets of foil, like specters. A
notable aspect is that the project is realised
at practically zero cost. Due to cooperation
between the Academy of Fine Arts and the
Rossini Opera Festival, the school of stage
design carefully preserves and utilizes all
leftover, discarded materials used to stage operas for the international Gioacchino Rossini
festival. The cooperation was sanctioned
with a convention based on which Academy
students created stage design for the operas
Demetrio e Polibio in the 2010 season and Il signor Bruschino in 2012. ‘The formula has never
been applied automatically’, says Francesco
Calcagnini, ‘but based on the principle of
healthy alternation. It makes me think that
our contribution is not determined by the
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face was realized with materials recycled in
the school workroom, materials that were
processed, repainted and radically transformed on school desks and tables. The eventual production in the school auditorium
closes with the sounds of Leonard Cohen’s The
Future, thus characterizing the generation for
whom the idea of sustainable development
is not a choice but a necessity. There are no
grounds for despair but one should realize
that creativity does not result from quality
or an abundance of means and instruments;
it results from an ability to constantly rethink the world, to restore its form and order
which, ultimately, exist only in our eyes.
English translation
by Anna Mirosławska-Olszewska
Translated from Italian into Polish by
Emiliano Ranocchi
All photos in the article: n. bruschi
fixed dates in the festival calendar but that
we are always intentionally invited to participate in given projects. Stage production
for the Rossini festival certainly contributes
to teaching because students perceive an
increasingly close relationship between
the world of education and the world of
work’. It should be added here that the art
of recycling is not only a noble ecological
practice but, first and foremost, a genuine
challenge for imagination and creativity,
which, contrary to popular belief, should not
be regarded as a sort of godsend or talent acquired by peculiar recombination of genetic
codes; creativity stems from daily practice
and continuous work on the project. It is not
accidental that a play narrating tragicomic
challenges that the not-fully-deceased has to
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