Rap (1996)

AUTHORS

Edoardo Sanguineti, Andrea Liberovici

DIRECTION

Andrea Liberovici

MUSIC

Andrea Liberovici

CAST

Ottavia Fusco
Andrea Liberovici
Enrico Ghezzi (voce fuoricampo)

SCENES

Eva Pollio

COSTUMES

Francesca Faiella

LIGHTING

Pippo Ghisoli

PRODUCER

teatrodelsuono

SHOTS SCENE

Alessandra Vinotto Sukkar

SYNOPSIS

It is difficult to write about "Rap" now that I'm so involved and I nearly make the errors of some mothers who arm a horrible baby with the total lack of objectivity. But I can tell the reasons that drove me to rap and that made me compose "Rap".
The rap makes play every sound, coherent or incoherent to the "plot", exactly as the "dream" represent through visual material.
For these reasons "Rap" is a show about the dream, because in the method of composing rap there are many analogies with the method of dreaming, which is made of free associations and metamorphosis. "Rap" hasn't therefore a story, but it has been composed by many musical stories, intuitive, born more from the reasons of sound or the inner rhythm of the word, rather than from Aristotelian novelistic narrations.
This musical kind with the exception of other recent expressions like rock, punk, grunge and so on, reinvented and fused together, perhaps involuntarily, musical kind very different among them like the "recitativo" or "recitar cantando" of the '600 century, the contemporary concrete music, the American black culture and other creative transgressions, which are made by the use of new musical instruments, the musical computer science, the recording studies, the rooms of echo, and so on, reaching therefore a complexity of interpretative hypothesis of fascination.
This freedom of writing, becoming also immediately "kind" and therefore in some way becoming arid, (if it is true as Cocteau says that: "... the revolutionary artist is before ignored, then mocked and when this does not work they try to eliminate you covering you of honours") has legitimated, just because phenomenon of trade, something that was in the air for a long time and that, in my opinion, motivates and justifies the deep sense of making music: the game.
I do not love the rhetorical on the young spontaneity, and that on the return to infancy; I'm well as I am. The game, which I refer, is clearly the complex game of the composition, in this case not only of music but of a show.
Interested to the dream as container of game, I have begun to attend the literature from Artemidoro, Jouvet, Freud and so on, but finding out in "the smaller" literature (that is, books about interpretation of dreams and game of the lottery, the Smorfia and so on) the theatrical and musical elements more stimulating. In a first and shy letter to Sanguineti, I brought back this example: Dragon (Dream) = a bad mother-in-law (Interpretation) = N° 69 (Destiny). Three voices for and of one only subject, possible character; the voice of "Dream" that is the "truth" (a naturalistic rap???) the voice of the "interpretation" (a alienated rap???) and the voice of the "destiny" that determinates and shuffles the cards at random, playing.
Three voices have then become, following a circular movement, which are Ottavia Fusco's, Enrico Ghezzi's and mine, to the service of one only and main voice: the word of the poet/character. Sanguineti, when they say that anybody doesn't invent nothing new, had already worked at least ten years ago on the Neapolitan Smorfia, writing a book in baroque prose entitled "Smorfie", then used like plot of "Rap".
In order to remain in this climate of chance and analogies, I wished, as after I have made, to write part of music for quartet of strings (to manipulate) for the possibilities to play the quarters of tone and the micro intervals therefore similar to some modulations of speaking.
In 1965 the university professor (at that time I was three years old and I swear it has escaped me) published "Traumdeutung" (theatrical text that takes the original title from "the interpretation of the dreams" by S. Freud), for four actors and as many music stands, as they were a quartet of strings. The musical composition, with coincidences, numbers of lottery and moments of panic, has been formed by the rap, but focusing the search on many rhythmic possibilities of speaking and acting.
My interest for the rhythm is born in 1987 during the rehearsals of a show with the direction of Giancarlo Sbragia. Sbragia stopped an actress who they say in slang was singing the cues and he explained her that in order only to create interest it did not have to try intonations, notes, but simply create some obstacles to the rhythm, break it, like the thought naturalistically does in its evolving (meeting fragmentations, suspensions, accelerating and so on) before becoming completed sound.
The scenic assembly has happened in a logical way and it works with the musical drama.
The direction was in some way already happened in the composition of the sonorous and poetic material. Obviously the creative relationship with all the limited staff of friends and the collaborators has completed and remarkably enriched the show.
What other can say? I wish to thank Sanguineti for this opportunity and for having encouraged me to play.

Andrea Liberovici

Genova 09/30/1996

copyright © 2004