Pictures from Gihan
direction Claudia Sorace
drama / suond Riccardo Fazi
technical direction Maria Elena Fusacchia
video processing Luca Brinchi, Maria Elena Fusacchia
performance Claudia Sorace, Riccardo Fazi
dramaturgy consultant Giuseppe Acconcia
sound effects advice Edmondo Gintili
dresses Fiamma Benvignati
organization Manuela Macaluso
stage pictures Stefano Augeri
big thanks to Glen Blackhall for the questions asked, Lukas Wildpanner for the audio advices and Tony Clifton Circus for their microphones
production Muta Imago
coproduction Romaeuropa Festival 2013 artistic residencies Orchard Project – New York, Kollatino Underground – Roma, Teatro Biblioteca Quarticciolo – Roma, Teatro di Roma, Inteatro Polverigi; a show born inside the Wake Up! project by Teatro di Roma
Gihan I. is a young egyptian blogger. In 2011, like hundreds of thousands of her fellow citizens, she lived through a revolution. Starting from the first image of February 11, 2011 in which Gihan is interviewed in Tahrir Square, until today’s tweets through which Gihan tells of her life in Cairo under the military coup, we try, through her glance, to trace a personal and collective story, recollecting and manipulating the traces of a life that happens faraway from us, asking ourselves why we feel it so close to ours. And wondering in which ways it speaks to us.
The two founders of the company, Claudia Sorace and Riccardo Fazi, back onstage after six years, recollect the traces of three personal lives and put them together, make them explode, attempting to understand in which ways and through which questions, these faraway lives could connect, even if only for the length of a performance.
Dear Gihan,
As you may already know, last winter we started working on a project about you. For months we followed your traces on the web, we read your tweets, facebook’s post, we watched again and again your pictures and your photos. We were trying to understand the incredible events that were happening in those days in Egypt moving from your particular point of view. With time passing, we get affected to your glance, we started feeling it more and more close to ours, even if it remained so faraway at the same time. And we understood that to reach the bottom of our research we had to meet you, we had to be there: in order to understand what does it really mean to live and survive a great thing as a revolution; in order to discover if your personal story could meet our personal story, if your gestures, your actions, your choices could talk to us and in which way. For this reason, at the beginning of last summer, we decided to come to Cairo to meet you, even though you had never responded (and you still haven’t) to any of our mails.
We had arranged everything.
But then, on June 30th, 2013, everything changes.
After months of absence you are back on the internet and you restart telling your days.
We start again to follow your traces.
But this time there is a difference. Your daily accounts juxtapose with ours: your days of joy, fear and rage happen far in space, but not in time anymore, while we try in every way to understand what’s happening and to reach you, to be as close as we could to you.
We are not anymore in front of a picture, of which to study the carachteristics. We are in front of a mirror, and the image moves with us. It’s not anymore only about you, but also about us, while we try to organize our trip to Cairo, and the questions that we prepared for you start echoing in ourselves.
Finally, last november, the show had its premiere in Rome. We recorded it for you so now you can see it.
The show was intended to be the tale of a revolution: it ended to be the tale of a summer. The tale of two persons who, onstage, try to give back the signs of their investigation, open the archive of their sources and manifest their attempt to enter inside of a story that is being made without them.
We would really love to know what you think about it, to have a confrontation with you at the end of it all.
An end that, who knows, might be a new beginning.
Waiting for your answer,
all the best,
Riccardo, Claudia, Muta Imago
