DEADLINE

Deadline is a multimedia performance, which creates a simulation of “burn-out” on stage. The performance is designed to be executed in narrow spaces where the public is close to the performer, so as to create a form of immersion where the slightest breath is palpable.  Andro Manzoni, whose syndrome is a repeated story in his family, tries to live burnout on stage to avoid suffering it in reality. He experiences three kinds of burnout, like the kind of his grandad, his father and a potential one already rising in himself. It is a question of experiencing it, on stage – to give the scene something of the vibrancy of reality, and to remove from reality its power of destruction. In order to do so, smells, sounds, lights and materials provide the very concrete immersive vocabulary from which springs the symbolism. 

It was really difficult to approach such material like the burnout. Not just because it is a spread phenomenon that needs a particular care, but also because it is so easy to enter in already explored paths. The choice was to focus on the human intimate and on small details, rather than a social or scientific approach. To make it more like a private confession. 

In this performance time is dilated and perceived rather than reduced. Set in a liminal space that can be an office or a private place, the use of technology simply fulfills its function, dictates the rhythms, creates sound and visual scenarios. In this landscape a modern Jesus gives life to post-dramatic fragments: repetitions of the same moment. An instant that, dilated over time, changes and presents itself in different forms with each repetition. 

A journey that in its dramaturgical structure leads us from within the world that an individual carries within, to an external one, visible in alienation and physical tiredness, like in an enteroscopy. Where a keyboard breaks the silence and gives shape to the inner words that cannot be said and it tears apart and comments the image that is being built, opening up to other worlds. A somatic and existential journey where the inner world acts as a door to the marks left on the body. On one hand the water, which changes state, as a sign of the psychophysical state of the performer to feel submerged with him, in apnea from the world. On the other the fire appears on video, on the same TV that reveals the unspoken words, as if all our malaise were locked up in that screen. 

No solutions, just exploration and questions. Where a performer is constantly surveilled by the audience, that don’t intervene but sense his anguish in a last sparkle of humanity. 

Concept, sound, light, video and performance
ANDRO MANZONI 

Directing, light, video, dramaturgy and text
PAOLO PANIZZA
 
Set design, costume, video and light
BLANDINE GRANIER 

Supported by:
AADN – Arts et Cultures Numériques (France), SlowMa- chine (Italy), Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg (Germany), EMTA – Eesti Muusika- ja Teatriakadeemia (Estonia), ENSATT Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Techniques du Théâtre (France), Akureyri Cultural Fund and Cultural Center HOF (Iceland). 

Full Performance LINK
Status: Active
Booking contact: foldinghouseproductions@gmail.com