PATHETIC AFFECTIVITY

written and performed by the detainee students

of the Institute of Art, prison section

with the extraordinary participation of Virginia Virilli

directed by Giorgio Flamini

stage elaboration Simone Bacci and Maria Paola Buono

Voices. Footprints. Gestures. Objects.

Traces of spaces and structures. Signs of a vital presence that from a transparent cell reproduced on a1:1 scale radiates onto the public, and beyond, like the exploded wooden elements which compose the cell and covers the public to become pure color in an indefinite horizon.

Pathetic affectivity, conceived, created and staged by the students of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd classes of the Art Institute associated headquarters House of Imprisonment, under the guidance of Prof. Giorgio Flamini is neither a truth-show, nor a documentary: it is certainly a show that wants to voice the "Voices from inside", the thoughts, the dreams of its protagonists, in the daily gestures, the objects, in the significant spaces, in the rhythms that mark the time of detention.

But through the work of its Authors- Actors, the substance of truth of Pathetic affectivity becomes substance of a re-elaboration where it is the formal treatment that dominates.

And so the walking becomes almost like a Pina Baush performance, with its strict geometrical joints.

The muffled voices of the courtyards become rap. The solitary reflection, in its persistent repetition, bends to a low drone upon which to interweave a crescendo of humoristic and self-ironic inlays. The dialogues of awakening are transfigured into a sort of eidyllion with a Theocritean flavor.

The talks represent the truth of gestures, of care, of affections with a contrapuntal treatment. Pathetic

affectivity is, in many ways unsustainable, just like a truth that you would like to conceal or remove. But it mainly wants to show that the theatrical word and gesture, with the formal control that they require, provide the access keys to the most complete and authentic ποίησις and to spaces of incompressible freedom that it can open up to those who reach it. To all the students who contributed to the production of Pathetic Affectivity and to Giorgio Flamini who led them in the difficult art of inventio, my heartfelt thanks.