<age>

concept and direction:
Francesca Pennini

dramaturgy and didactics assistant:
Angelo Pedroni

assistance:

Carmine Parise

action and creation:

Tilahun Andreoli

Samuele Bindini

Thomas Calvez

Marco Calzolari

Camilla Caselli
Jacques Lazzari

Matteo Misurati
Angelo Pedroni

Emma Saba

Martina Simonato

production:
 CollettivO CineticO
Romaeuropa Festival
 Armunia / Festival Inequilibrio
 L’Arboreto Teatro Dimora di Mondaino
 CSC Centro per la Scena Contemporanea / Operaestate Festival Veneto
Festival miXXer / Conservatorio di Ferrara

artistic residency:
Scarlattine Teatro / Il Giardino delle Esperidi
 Armunia / Festival Inequilibrio
 L’Arboreto Teatro Dimora di Mondaino
 CSC Centro per la Scena Contemporanea / Operaestate Festival Veneto

rehearsal space:
Teatro Comunale di Ferrara
piece for theatre stages
year 2012

duration 60'

winner of "Bando Progetto Speciale Performance 2012. Ripensando Cage"

The project <age> continues a line of research on the uncertainty priciple and the systems of rules typical of games.
The performers are non-professional teen-agers, just before or immediately after the threshold of 18 years old.
In this particular and ephemeral time span the relationship with the concept of rule (both socially and legally) is extremely specific and constantly shifting. A teen-ager is biologically and chemically programmed to be a risk-taker and therefore it’s the ideal candidate to be a performer in the ludic, uncertain and regulated evironment of a theatre stage.
The cast has been chosen through an articulated audition and selected in order to be heterogeneous in personality, physicality and experiences.
The group has then followed a cicle of workshops where being spectators and working as “mimetic kamikaze” in the urban spaces where the main strategies to prepare them for the stage. The creation has been developed during artistic residencies with immersive experiments and daily-life tasks.
The piece is structured as a “human atlas”, a live taxonomy of the performers and the characteristics of each specific event.
The movement has been composed working with the peculiarity of each person and through the method “codice cinetico”.
Each choreographic material has a specific nomenclature in order to be identified by the performers.
At the same time has been collected a questionnaire of more than 400 questions proposed by the performers and by people that took part to phases of the work.
Those questions, together with ones that are a total surprise, become a filter of selection in categories.
The performers don’t know which parameters (questions) will be asked during the performance and which movement material will be called.
The actions can be part of the codified repertoire they have or an intuitive behavior that they have to make on the spot.
The answers of the teen-age group are based on their own opinion on themself and their presence fully expose their choices as individuals.
Each performative event is different from the others, it cannot be rehearsed and it constantly presents unpredictable reactions generating an atmosphere of high intensity and subtle irony.

"Yes, but what does happen in <age>? In addition to the actions themselves, generated by the observation of the peculiarities of each "specimen" what we see is an exposure - and perhaps this is what more disarm us - not so much to the eye as to the thoughts of the audience. This is a generosity as intense as it is clear that in <age> is not a sealed fetish, but a vibration to resonate with, a porosity to approach with respect and decency. It is with the strenght of a tacit moral lessons that these teenagers share fragility and desires, inviting us to suspend any judgment to be open, us too, to life. They remind us how powerful can be an encounter: not only the one between them and a choreographer that is just a decade older, but also between them and us, anonymous observers in the darkness of the room, we too every night different."

[ Andrea Nanni ]

"In <age>, a sharp tribute to the American composer, there are nine "kamikaze teenagers" that perform live, relying on a mechanism of carefully structured improvisation, a variety of daily activities, or better of "exposures". Nine touching, funny, evocative though extremely human (or rather, precisely because extremely human) specimens of a wild-eyed medieval bestiary. A fantastic taxonomy à la Borges, a catalog of every day wonders. Main merit of this "training of the viral criminality of performative practices" is therefore being an invitation, light and firm, gentle and ferocious, to find a gaze authentically, revolutionary epiphanic. "Sometimes there's no need to invent a world", seem to tell us the precious artists of CollettivO CineticO. The world is there, and you just need to watch it."

[ Michele Pascarella - Gagarin ]

"It's immediately evident the ability to touch the invisible substance of adolescence: its glories, its marginalization, its cracks, its - sometimes impossible - exhausting reserch of equilibrium, its metamorphosis. A surprising and poetic palette is drawn, where video game and tenderness, aggression and sweetness, bullyism and gender reflection, love and courage, the test, the adventure, the desire, the charm, the exaltation, the skills, the confidence, the geometry and a barbaric, withheld, exposed poetry coexist and are painted on the faces, on the gestures, on different human types: tough, soft, frigtened, "losers", fearless...Francesca Pennini and Angelo Pedroni create a masterpiece of sensitivity and intelligence, a mirror of the generation that the later in life consider an indecipherable mistery. They do not provide easy acces key: they accumulate masks and it's known that in the mask is hidden, sometimes immediately visible, the depth. They offer fantastic, delicate, sharp flashes of inspirations."

[ Massimo Marino - Corriere di Bologna ]