8 ½ Theatre Clips

The Corona virus has marked a fracture in our history and in our collective memory.
It has forever changed our habits, our daily lives, indelibly influencing our relationships with the other people and with the non-domestic environment.
Within a few months we have lost all aspects of proximity and physical, human contact. Our sociality has become increasingly aseptic, cold, distant, ethereal.
Covid-19 uniformed us, disciplined us, put the same mask on everyone.
Suddenly our safety circle has shrunk to home walls. Our whole world has been enclosed in a room: thoughts, memories, emotions, dreams. Our window has become the only eye on the world, together with the screen of the TV, always tuned to the latest news: numbers, figures, statistics.

8 1⁄2 Theatre Clips was born from this global experience as a utopian experiment of artistic collaboration and intercultural dialogue between Italy and Iran. The project aims to produce a series of 8 video performances which will end with a talk between the artists involved, to illustrate the innovative remote creative process adopted.

Eight episodes and a half, therefore a structure that refers by analogy of titles to the Federico Felini’s masterpiece 8 1⁄2, a film set in a situation of withdrawal, of isolation from the outside world, in which the director and protagonist of the film, finds himself unable to realize his work, while the days pass and the real facts, the memories and fantasies overlap one another more and more, until they become indistinguishable.

A dreamlike condition similar to the one experienced by all of us during the lock down, when every human being found himself unable to achieve something, and to contemplate an absence that has been populated with memories and new habits, in which the relationship with the other has changed drastically and time has expanded dramatically.

A theatrical transposition of domestic life scenes that have and are still characterizing this difficult historical moment, a document of our new sociality, realized through the approach, the gaze, the artistic sensitivity of interpreters of two different cultures, united by the same experience and by the same approach to art and life.

Inspired freely by the Fellini 8 1⁄2 film concept, and on the occasion of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great filmmaker, we will investigate the themes behind each episode: waiting, fear, boredom, dream, new social relationships, return to the cities, freedom after the lockdown. We will experiment each time different forms of remote interaction: the video into the video, the decomposition of the screen into two or more parts, the interaction and overlapping of images through editing, always creating a bilingual Italian and Farsi dialogue between the actors, who will perform physical, mimic and textual scores using different techniques: acting, mime, dance, object and visual theater, masques