Before The Revolution Remix

Can language contain the evolution of a society? [...]
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Online theatre
︎2022

Part of Lingua Madre - a project by Carmelo Rifici and Paola Tripoli winner of:
︎ the Hystrio Prize for Digital Theatre 2021
︎ Premio Ubu 2021

Web adaptation and direction
Alan Alpenfelt

Voices
Monica Piseddu
Valentino Villa

Sound design
Zeno Gabaglio

Web design
Ivan Pedrini
Mike Toebbe
Irene Masdonati

Production
LAC

Presented in Lugano at the 27th edition of the FIT Festival, Before the Revolution by the Egyptian playwright Ahmed El Attar is here re-interpreted by Monica Piseddu and Valentino Villa and remixed by Alan Alpenfelt and Zeno Gabaglio who render it through a sound creation designed for web and SMS interaction.

In its original stage format, El Attar intertwined documentation and fiction relating to pre-revolutionary Egypt and the build-up to the “Arab Spring”. In this new adaptation, the sound creation conceived by Alpenfelt and Gabaglio for Lingua Madre draws on that imagery, with the addition of a reflection on whether it is possible or not to create Art freely.

The audience member is invited to enter the website and has the option whether to give his/her phone number, which will be deleted from the website’s system at the end of the experience.
An enigmatic video starts and an audio-drama is played, meticulously associated with the ongoing development of the video’s content. During the experience, the phone starts receiving a series of sms’ which tell a parallel story that unfolds into a strikingly reality.
All three narratives lead to one place.

Enjoy the experience (only in Italian language):
︎ Before the Revolution Remix

Monica Piseddu & Valentino Villa during recording sessions, LAC, Lugano.

Reading social network comments, with the inherent violence in the nefarious attacks launched from one account to another, the hatred and venom shouted at home or at neighbours, the violence of the superheroes that mass films continue to favour, the rhetoric that conceals (when it does not exploit) anxieties, malaise, distrust, poverty and misery - you would hope not. Yet it is precisely in language that one can read the direction in which the world is evolving.
In Before The Revolution, language marks a limit, an anthropological and social condition that could no longer continue. And indeed in 2011 Arab society took to the streets in an attempt to find new solutions. But Before The Revolution also traces an impossibility of expression, an impossibility of progress, an inability - for language - to further investigate reality.
Indeed, in the original play, it was the theatrical staging, the stage space, that expressed the unspeakable in all its explosiveness. The challenge of transposing such a vehement duality - that of text and stage, without being able to rely on the physicality of the body - into sound alone seemed immediately daunting. The search for a solution - an authentic one, not a surrogate - meant defining a new alternative with respect to the sound flow of language. A deus ex machina of perception that would be able to instil the question, to suggest the doubt around the sayable. The unpredictable alternation between the platforms of digital fruition seemed to us the most appropriate solution. Leaving the linearity of Before The Revolution to one vector - even if remixed with an authentically musical taste - and moving to other vectors the making of the project, that all those doubts - those reflections, those fears - have seen to be born and to mature.
- Director’s notes

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Past Events

FIT - Festival internazionale del teatro e della scena contemporanea
Lingua Madre
1-10.10.2021
Site

Jacqueline - Jackie - Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis is the most famous American First Lady in history, an icon of a society that mirrors a media-driven world; a world in which image is worth more than reality. Jackie is the prototype of the “new” woman; the perfect wife, mother and widow, yet imprisoned in her elegant Chanel suit stained with blood and brain matter.
Jackie seems to be unable to break out of her character, becoming the mirror of something that we recognise belogns to us, too. We ourselves are Jackie. We, with our faces painted and our party clothes, our perfect body weight and our family photos. We, who don't know who Jackie really is any more than perhaps we know ourselves. And so it is that Jackie instils in us the doubt that behind the image and pop iconicity there is a raw truth and that true existence lies elsewhere.

In the light of recent “Me Too” movement, I found the female condition to be an interesting focus for the exploration of the mysterious dialectic between oppressor and oppressed. Without wanting to find either intended victims or potential heroines, I found that female characters offered a further condition in which oppression is perhaps most clearly revealed: they are all too often subjected to control over their freedom, desires, roles, and self expression. The consequences have long-term physiological, bodily, psychic and linguistic effects.

Alan Alpenfelt

Installations

Performance

Theatre

Community radio

Pedagogy & Training

Before The Revolution Remix

Jackie

Words and Music

The Trial for the Donkey’s Shadow

Operation Vega