Viaggio sentimentale…ed oltre, 1976

Viaggio sentimentale… ed oltre (1976)

by Simone Carella e Ulisse Benedetti
with Corine Young, Charlene Bogen, Antonello Neri
stage reconstruction by Domenico Bianchi, Gianni Dessì, Marco Pistolesi
debut: Rome, Beat’ 72, 27th May 1976

Viaggio sentimentale… ed oltre

by Francesco Panaro
In Simone Carella and Ulisse Benedetti’s Viaggio sentimentale… ed oltre (‘Sentimental Journey… and Beyond’, shown for the first time at Beat ’72 on May 27th 1976, performed by the company Gruppo Teatro Stran’amore), sound was the dominating element. The performance contained an investigation into sound that tied together the three pieces that formed the whole. The first element was Feu d’artifice by the Italian futurist Giacomo Balla with music by Igor Stravinsky, an abstract mise en scène from 1917 in the form of a dancerless ballet of four minutes and a half. The second element was Simone Carella’s own Feu d’artifice, which involved sixty light changes: effectively a symphony of colours which perfectly and synchronically matched the music. Once again, Carella did without the actor here, preferring to treat the theatre as an abstract entity and employing the origins of abstract theatre as a line of research: the futurist theatre had also worked on the absence of the actor, in pieces such as Depero’s Colori from 1916 or some of Prampolini’s pieces from the Pantomima Futurista, in which the actor was substituted by “jolts and luminous shapes”.