In these years of end of century, time trespasses us with a zapping speed; TV news spill over our table and it becomes more and more difficult to keep hold, to verify, to confront them.

Even the past has changed its aspect: more often it’s nothing more than what “they tell us”.

This is the reason why we decided on a show on Memory, on the importance to exercise mindful remembering on men’s behalf: not as a nostalgic episode, but because our lives are made of a sum of men’s experiences. Only if we are able to collect and remember dangers, risks and dark sides of our history (men’s exploitation as an example) we may hope to overcome them some day.

From the original novel by Gorge Orwell

As the title suggests, this play recalls explicitly the novel by George Orwell: a revolution takes place in a farm, animals against their master. After victory over men, with pigs leading the group, the animals reorganize their society around the principles of fraternity and equality. All is good in the beginning but then pigs discover how soft it is to sleep in beds, that walking on two legs is difficult but not impossible: like bending and then changing rules to a “game” while playing… up until the other animals are unable to distinguish them from… men.

To write for youngsters

The "knowledge" of making a show that will be seen by many boys and girls of different ages brings issues, for example, on the topic that we decide to deal. But the actual choice of the theme or “the making of” (meaning the way in which a topic becomes theater) are not influenced.

This for various reasons: first because today youngsters are subordinated to many and such solicitations that are prepared to find meaning also in presence of a complex language, often with more acumen than adults; second because we always try to realize a product that can be understood from various angles-shot and not for a simple specific age. So it is entirely possible for child to leave the theater with the story in mind, and the main characters acknowledged but older or even adults will have other levels - this is a our goal - to reveal new meanings. We therefore arrive to the adult audience with contemporary worries: the intrusiveness of TV and media in general, the urgency and necessity to educate ourselves, to read newspapers in order to defend ourselves from a general opinion, to conserve the memory of what a man is, of its contradictions, of the errors: perhaps only then it will be possible to reach a better tomorrow, ahead, in true progress.

Not a nostalgic memory, we have said, but historical and social: that does not want to forget exploitation of man on man or the barbarisms of economic and alimentary distribution of 20% on 80% of the remaining humanity.

Oblivion is an obvious risk in a culture that considers hard work to remember men and events of recent past.

Here then we explain the beginning, a solo actor that talks to the public but also to his companions. Here the reason why a cloth is raised on Orwell’s novel, and the choice to contaminate the history of the animals’ republic with the intrusiveness of Moloch television (here a sort of big brother). Here above all, a reason to hope: it is possible not to remain captive of the own errors.

The play

Six actors who move in the total theater space in order to tell the story, amuse and stimulate the audience. By saying “total” it means exactly that it is not limited to the theater box, but the whole space is used in novelistic function. Alberto Grilli has chosen to evoke (and not to describe) the nature of these man-animals, making his actors recall physically and vocally their nature while using and moving what appear to be small reproductions of animals. Music is played live. Particular attention goes to the use of songs from popular tradition and its techniques, that have represented great space in the Teatro Due Mondi’s study and interest in the last ten years.

About Teatro Due Mondi

Teatro Due Mondi is a professional theater group that brought its work in many cities and theaters in Italy and abroad. As a cultural association its home is Faenza where it was founded in 1979, in addition the to the project, in 2004, the “Casa del Teatro” (House of theater) was added. Teatro Due Mondi is not new to productions of shows, performances, parades in town or in theaters and also organizes educational activities and work-shops in/for schools.