CND - Centro Nazionale Drammaturgia

The Manifest had been presented on occasion of the first International convention dedicated to "Total Theatre" and "Performance in Europe", that took place from the 12th to the 14th of November 2001 in the conference Hall of the National Museum of Popular and Traditional Arts in Rome.

The document was published in the April 2002, Number 83, of the magazine Prima Fila.

CONTENTS OF PLANNING REFERENCE

Unity in diversity.
The ninth of November one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine. Border, caesura, frontier, symbol of a political destabilization of world relevance. The ideological dream or nightmare has come to an end, that is, the illusion that society could be rationally designed pre-figuring a sort of Eden, reality has taken over. The revenge of reality on ideology has opened new projects on the geo-political horizon, placing on the agenda also the necessity for a new cultural interpretation key. The enemy disappeared, occidental culture went under shock. Concepts such as freedom, progress, development, culture, modernity, have suffered a slide. Liberalism does not represent the winners chariot, but the only chariot left at one's disposal.

The passage from political destabilization to cultural destabilization is a fact that implies the elaboration of new cultural projects and new methodologies in the theoretical prospective and the practice of unity in diversity. After the fall of the wall men wanted to live ion a unified space, having well rooted in their hearts and minds a deep desire of material and immaterial well being, accompanied by the need for social integration respectful of cultural specificities of reference. Theory and practice of unity in diversity represent the only vehicle left at our disposal to reach the port of a Great Civility of Ideas.

Paradoxes.
In the mass communication society there is no study, no research, no dialogue. There is a multitude of conventions, congresses, conferences, round tables, relations, reports, meetings, reunions, seminars, debates, talk shows, but there is no dialogue. There is development of technique, but there is no human progress. The byword is "business". Nothing against that, on conditions that it does not destroy art. On the artistic production front the movement resembles the doldrums and prevails on the action in defence of the status quo. There is no in depth investigation, there is no analysis of the territory, there are no politics for the social use of cultural patrimony, there is no research, no creativity. There is no time for creativity. All appears "new" "renewed" and "innovative", but the practice is characterized by repetitive expressive modules. There is no adequate production of thought and method that corresponds to the production of image. The cognitive datum burst to the maximum power. Out casting the perceptive one. Materia culture dominates. With all neo-rationalistic neo-deterministic neo-positivist implications. And the immaterial part of life and culture of man is neglected, if not completely forgotten. The sense of container without substance. Substance appears static, immobile, and therefore conservative. There is little soul activity, little Eros, little love. There is no phyla, there is no phantasm substance no mystery, no folly. "Light is tenebrous when it is only light" and two-dimensional man is finished, re dethroned into the dustbin.

The added value.
In the global market kitchen the cultural offer is triumphantly "multi-medial". Take a text, ad to it a little live music, show some slides, or otherwise place some twenty monitors on the stage and they presto the "ultra modern" game is done! When the project "National Centre of Dramatic Acts Total Theatre" was presented to the press in order to evidence the necessity of a strong re-launch of "inter-textual, inter-medial and synaesthesia" areas a faint ironic smile appeared on the lips of some monuments of immobile tradition and historical experimentation. The fact remains that today those "areas" obtain ever more success and are diffusing rapidly throughout the world. And it appears to us as an objective fact that – yesterday as today – to pass from the lounge of "word Theatre" to the kitchen of the "multi-medial product" still practically means mimesis with similar premises and methodologies, with essentially equivalent results. Information, explanation devoid of sentiments and psychologies, technical use of new communication instruments.

Current "multimedia" production makes use of linguistic materials that remain separate and distinguished in the offering plate. They don't tie. They don't exchange specificity. They don't interact; therefore they don't produce "added value". The food is there but there is no aroma. The perfume of poetry. And it is this perfume, aura, mystery, fantasy – that makes the difference. It allows us not to die of truth.

National dramatic acts writing, centred on the combination of words that tell the truth, generally ends up by being devoured by chronicle and precipitate in the stagnant waters of light's metaphysics. Victim of the dazzles that do not illuminate, the dramatic acts writing of the so-called "theatre of word" does not endure through time: it withers and soon dies. After all, it is one thing to assert the centrality of the word, another to decree its absolute dominion. Such dominion is unacceptable: a project founded on a system of variegated signs presents itself as a fact as elementary as it is necessary. And it is with this full potential that we can speak to the hearts and minds of men, in the knowledge that there are spheres of diverse nature but of equal importance – material and immaterial, speak-able and unspeakable, visible and invisible, palpable and impalpable – out of which one may not rescind. One must, however acknowledge that there are infinite poetries and styles, that there are many dramatic acts for many theatres, many theatres for many public and that public institution with the institutional task of fostering actions of "promotions" should support all dramatic acts in existence, all possible ones. "The House of Dramatic Acts" is an idea that we have launched exactly on the occasion of the convention on "Total Theatre" that was held in the month of November at the "National Museum of Popular and Traditional Arts" in Rome.

Shadow Light.
He who separates white from black, light from shadow, the movement of thought from the movement of desire, in art it rationalizes in life it demonises. "Light is tenebrous when it is only light" theory and practice of dual culture. (Parmenide already knew something about it) and about unity in diversity of language, diverse languages and culture are not recent inventions. They are contents that run on the line of centuries and represent the fertile soil for heterogeneous linguistic blends, capable of producing that added value to which we have referred.

To get back to primordial times.
How far does one have to walk only to discover that one must go back to the start, to return there where things maintain their differences, there where truth shows itself in a taut relation with non truth, the place of contention and unity of the constructive poles of human culture is realized. In this place, opposed and contrary harmonies and values meet charged up with tension, coexist without annulling each other and create an added reality. It is a space made of signs, where the word occupies a recognized centrality, but not an exclusive one. All the signs connect to a symbol that opens forwards the obscure truth. Mediation between the constructive poles of clarity and obscurity generates knowledge. Knowledge, therefore, as production of sense, wisdom, thought, cognition and ability but also aura, mystery, enigma, sensation, perception, sentiment. Our knowledge of ourselves includes at its centre a nucleus of cognitive knowledge and a nucleus of perceptive knowledge. In a tragically materialistic society such as the one in which we live there is knowledge, but there is not the not knowing. The birthplace of producers of new forms of communication and artistic expression is in the place from where they started. For this trip, however, one does not need feet, horses, ships or intercontinental airplanes. One needs some faculties, - that for the fact that they are invisible – are often underestimated or even ignored.

Shipwrecks without banks.
Live performance needs no actors, writers, and directors. It needs men. It needs no technocrats, but artists, that are poets. To be a poet it is not enough to a writer, one needs to be shipwrecked without banks. They rely on the strength of their own subjectivity. They are aware of the vastness of the interior world when faced with the anguish of the exterior world, the former being infinite the latter finite. They don't mask themselves, they reveal themselves. They throw a glance into the abyss of human errors and horrors, even personal ones. And they recognizes the God hidden in their "glorious body". For this reason , they have the capacity for the most objective extension possible. A poet does not imitate. He brings into being that which before was not. And if it is true that "art is the practice freed from the lie of being the truth", to get back to primordial times means to do as Ulysses did, who fled from Circe and Calypso in order to return there where he came from. And by doing as Ulysses did, the artist must be happy with the death of Orpheus for having been at once loved and lover of beautiful images. Beauty is in the wavy water from which Aphrodite was born, not in the still water in which Orpheus mirrored himself. It is beauty threatened by inconsistency, just as inconsistency threatens every project aimed at reconciling culture and nature.

The threshold.
Conciliation between clear communication and obscure expression is, without doubt, apparent. In its being apparent lies the impossibility to surmount the difference of opinions. And it couldn't be otherwise, because true conciliation is equivalent to destruction, that is, sure death. The difference of opinions between communicative values (memory, remembrance, style, experience history…) is the perceived value (sensations, sentiment, impression mystery…) it is to be left open on a sort of catwalk for sleepwalkers, given its threshold. It is a difference of opinion that generates clouds, that in turn generate more clouds and more clouds, and still clouds.

The veil.
Every artistic object is an opus where nature and culture try to achieve the dream of incurable non conciliation. And, in as much as incurable, it is a positive non conciliation, i.e. a creative one. Communication then does not become concrete in forms of descriptivism more or less high. The act of revelation goes through the word, image or sound conserving "the enigma of beauty", that is, the "shadowy colour" of organic form. In lifting the veil, it does not have to explain the inexplicable; it must not treat the good as a product of doubled reality, but as object of recreated reality. Artistic creation undergoes "passages, thoroughfares, tidal waves and transformations" that generate extraordinary auras, tastes and perfumes. And afterwards, the work can only be betrayed. And in as much complicated. To analyse, criticise, read, know any work means to analyse, read, know the veil that separates it from us. It does not consist in giving a rational explanation to all once and for all. The veil can and must be complicated, if one continues to accept methodically the "light/word that illuminates" together with "the dangerous intrigue of the shadow".

Nostos.
Therefore, artistic creation as nostos. As a return to an inter-textual, complex way, finally total. On the ground of "Total Theatre" or the "inter-medial areas" there is no flat word. Language is filled up silence, singing, shouting, murmuring, sound or its trace, image or its trace, the non-colour, the sign of diverse cultures. It is also that which is perceived and left on the threshold of phrases. And also the "rhythmic peculiarities tied to music and dance, and also the inter-disciplinary and inter-semiotic value expressed through centuries, still never losing awareness of the immense possibilities that language has to be able to enclose in itself phantasms and projections of all five senses". The linguistic blends, by not being the result of a formula, are also running the risk of producing a mere container, that in reference to the expanding fashion is mere multi-medial container. In it not the object that is beautiful. Nor is its container. It is the object in its container that is beautiful.

Creation as act of abdication.
"Creation" is not an act of power but one of abdication. It is the way that God retired and where He can only return as beggar. A way whose reality is made by the mechanism of the matter and by the autonomy of a reasoning creature. "In sensitive representation – meaningful "generates without doubt a strong "breath of writing". This is destiny for man and things. Man must save things from nothingness, protecting them from absolute nudity. Absolute nudity is not only impracticable, but it has a destructive effect on things. Things are destroyed exactly in the moment in which we want to "save" them, "remember them" Value them".