The collective Teatro Sotterraneo, even if a doomsday scenarios, would not lose the opportunity to gather new ideas from experience. Aim: to survive all, but in the meantime see what happens.
With a view to an imminent catastrophe, where would you seek refuge and which would it be your survival kit?
We like to imagine catastrophe as a public and impersonal event. Before it happens we split ourselves, each one of us with a camera, a video camera and a notebook, each one of us in a different refuge: a submarine watercraft, an underground bunker, a mountainous height, a half-plane – except for one of us who goes straight towards the catastrophe, into the rumpus, or at least as close to it as possible. Before leaving, we arrange an appointment in the future: a place, a time and a date. The aim is to survive all (or almost) of us, share the documentation and convey the experience from different point of views: we won’t see necessarily the same catastrophe. Therefore the kit includes things useful during the traumatic event and things that will be useful later. In the first group, apart from the instruments necessary for the documentation, we include comfortable clothes, water and food, weapons – because people turn dangerous during a catastrophe – and a compass; in case these things wouldn’t be enough, we (however) take into account the possibility to sack shops and supermarkets, in the most critical moments. In the second group we include bicycles, books, medicines and mug shots to find back our loved ones. Among these things, in one of the pockets of the backpack, we put condoms. There is no hurry to repopulate the planet.
Active since 2004, the collective (from Florence) Teatro Sotterraneo (a playwright and four performers) puts on stage productions full of cynicism and humour (mainly black), lucid and ferocious incursions in both individual and collective unconscious. With its habit of taking apart certainties and dissecting beliefs, Teatro Sotterraneo (literally underground theatre, TN) draws sceneries that represent an alternative to contemporary world. While the apocalypse moves forward, there is time for a last, liberating laugh.
text by Francesca Cogoni
photo by Carlo Beccalli for DROME magazine
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- Teatro Sotteraneo photographed in the Centrale Fies, at the drodesera festival 2011, by Carlo Beccalli for DROME magazine
