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"ARLECCHINO E IL SUO DOPPIO"
(HARLEQUIN AND HIS DOUBLE)
Study for a Survival 
 

   
   
   
   
 
With  Claudia Contin
Directing and dramaturgy by   Ferruccio Merisi
Scripts by  Ferruccio Merisi e Claudia Contin
Masks and Costumes: Claudia Contin
Staging, lighting and images: Ferruccio Merisi
Research and musical assemblage: Alessio Prosser and Veronica Risatti
Singing consultancy: Antonio Antonini
Linguistic consultancy and English translation: Jeff Shaer and Ivan Buttazzoni
Tailoring: Annamaria Biscontin Parpinelli
Set construction: Egisto Parpinelli e Luigi Rosa
Decorative painting: Elena Pin
Find-it-and-fix-it: Lucia Zaghet
Accessories: Walter Carrara
Technical assistants: Lucia Zaghet
 
Apart from the rather folkloric light that sometimes accompanies it, the collective memory of Harlequin cleanly divides into two parts: that which is historic, made up of documents, of actors and of authors; and that which, instead, is rendered in images, which corresponds to a quasi-myth, in as much as it is incomplete and not delimited in a particular fable or destiny. In this dimension, as with Oedipus, Prometheus or Hamlet, even though he may still be free after every inevitable tragedy, Harlequin is also a figure that embodies something of the obscure depths of humanity. It is said that his progenitors or prototypes provided carnevalesque bursts into social reality, after a ritual period of sojourn in the woods - after a period, literally, of immersion in the wilderness.
The attraction that Claudia Contin has felt towards this Harlequin - or a part of this Harlequin - has been almost physiological: an actor's body has felt itself specifically "called upon" to take on those particular postures, angles and rhythms. One might say to embody specific "savage" obscurities.
In parallel, throughout many years of research with the help of Ferruccio Merisi, the same type of elemental attraction has been followed through by Claudia when faced with postures, angles and rhythms, proposals, like the mutations of the vision of the self, from the brush of a painter like Egon Schiele.
This performance explores the meaning of this attraction and, out of necessity, the relationships between two language's: that of renewing the sense of difference, of continuing to understand, of fleeing from being recognised.

Harlequin from certain aspects has been a stone in a pond, a satellite in unknown space...  He has been the off-spring of a deliberate choice and at the same time the antecedent of a great questioning ... He has respected, but then inexorably changed our life, our philosophy, the very instruments that had constructed him.
And now he wants to undertake another journey. We know only, as is right, where we are taking off from and, in a certain sense, also what we are leaving behind.

In the preceding performances there was, apart from the mask, the courage to sing out with voice and body the difficult poetry of of one's own "absence" from the world. Today what drives us is an apparently more comfortable and at the same time more dangerous feeling: Harlequin, like a voodoo sprite, wants to let himself go off to "visit" the world and its history, perhaps undertaking, from place to place, from time to time, to change himself, like a true revolutionary...and nevertheless also not giving up on one of the most important symbols of the eternal and necessary "wherever".

"Harlequin and His Double - study for a survival" is the title of this new madness of Harlequin, who no longer has two masters, but nevertheless recognises that he is unable to desist from making acrobatic leaps between two realities, or perhaps simply and tragically between two points of view, between two selves that look "outside".

This dialectic reasoning of his, as comically impossible as it is undeniable, is also represented by two language's that are bodily and ritually different, which refer to to the ancient and to the actual, to the comic and to the tragic, to the heroic and to the handicapped, continually swapping poles and meanings. One of them is that of the character that presents himself as heir - naughty and rebellious - to the historical traditions of Commedia dell'Arte, otherwise that Harlequin that Claudia has taken on and continually re-invented within her own body for over twenty years; the other is that which is protean and it too multicoloured - which Claudia has constructed over the same years in a new dramaturgy for the contemporary actor, taking on their own body the vision of the human condition elaborated by an enigmatic shaman of contemporaneity, as has been the painter Egon Schiele (1890 - 1918).

"Harlequin and His Double - study for a survival" is not however a performance of "theatre-within-theatre"; it is rather a confession, a "living testament" generalisation, which affronts, with ferocious lightness, one of the ethical contentions of contemporary humanity: "to be or not to be, to swallow or to vomit...not to sleep, perhaps to sing..."
Following moreover some sonorous and poetic icon of the history of rock, the performance unfolds without managing to abandon the English language, accepted as the language of global exchange,  and certainly not only in the literal and literary sense but also in the anthropological and psychoanalytic, as the language of Hamlet.. To which the "Harlequinese" of Signor Harlequin Batocio surely replies with rimes, where it can...Arlecchino

Recommended audience: for adults.
 Technical requirements:
 Scenic space: min. 6 x 7
Full backdrop, black or at least neutral.
Central connection (in the case of a stage an accessible stairway) between the scenic space and the audience space
Lighting power: 15 kw
Lighting and sound control from the back of the audience space.
Two portable and demountable lighting poles (necessary even in the case of well placed American-style ones)
8 spotlights of 1000w
A 12 channel mixer with double double scene manual functioning, positioned at the back of the audience space
Cables to provide 4 double adaptors to the dimmer
Amplification: 150 watt, with CD player; speaker boxes at the back of the scenic space, on the stage, behind scenery and the mixer at the extreme opposite, at the back of the audience.
Change room heated and with nearby toilet/shower
Mounting time: 5 hours
Dismantling time: 2.5 hours
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