ANAGOOR (IT): L.I. | Lingua Imperii so violent was the force that struck it dumb

22/9/2013 at 20:00 @ &TD Big Hall

Duration: 100 min / Free entrance

CYCLE OF YOUNG ITALIAN AUTHORS & APAP – PERFORMING EUROPE,

theatre performance

Foto: Alessandro Sala

Foto: Alessandro Sala

Stories of unnameable hunts: not metaphors, but concrete historical phenomena, hateful old habits according to which some men have become predators of other men and, even in the twentieth century, have soaked the soil of Europe with the blood of millions of people: so much its civil heart as its vast and beautiful forests, reaching as far as its mountainous borders. Mourners who no longer want to be hunters and, in front of the resurfaced memory of the victims, complain the burden of guilt for the bloody hunting.
The Caucasus —easternmost limit of Europe, natural boundary, Mountain of Languages (as it is sometimes known), inextricable tangle of ethnic groups, maze marking and confounding the boundaries at one and the same time— rises as the epicentre of memory and turns into a mythical place of this judgment. The theatrical form chosen for this creation of ours is the tragic chorus where singing and music, gesture and totemic vision are closely intertwined.
A small community of women and men of various ages shoot their voice-darts in between a jolt to the heart a lament and a dream. The chorus includes a singer of Armenian origin. She is a traditional custodian of an ancient and vast musical heritage, and living memory of a people who was wounded by an unforgotten —yet often shamefully ignored— genocide.
As on the wide central screen the victim’s manifold face gradually emerges, on the two LCD side screens, a struggle unfolds between two Nazi officers, each championing opposing views of life. L.I., Lingua Imperii, is the language of the empire meant as coercive domination. It is the poor, brutish, deceitful language of the Nazi propaganda. It is the alphabets and the languages taught by force. But it is also a gag imposed as a violent gift by the rulers. Ultimately, it is the very language of violence.

Trailer

ANAGOOR | L.I. LINGUA IMPERII promo 2 (ENG) from Anagoor on Vimeo.

 

Directed by Simone Derai

Dramaturgy Simone Derai, Patrizia Vercesi
With Anna Bragagnolo, Mattia Beraldo, Moreno Callegari, Marco Crosato, Paola Dallan, Marco Menegoni, Gayanée Movsisyan, Eliza Oanca, Monica Tonietto
And with Hannes Perkmann, Hauptsturmbannführer Aue, Benno Steinegger, Leutnant Voss
Voice-over Silvija Stipanov, Marta Cerovecki, Gayanée Movsisian, Yasha Young, Laurence Heintz
Translation & Language Consulting Filippo Tassetto
Costume Design Serena Bussolaro, Silvia Bragagnolo, Simone Derai
Original Score Mauro Martinuz, Paola Dallan, Marco Menegoni, Simone Derai, Gayanée Movsisyan, Monica Tonietto
Non Original Score Komitas Vardapet, musiche della tradizione medievale armena
Cameramen/Video Moreno Callegari, Simone Derai, Marco Menegoni
Dramaturgy Simone Derai, Patrizia Vercesi
Directed by Simone Derai
Produced by Anagoor 2012
Co-production Trento Film Festival, Provincia Autonoma di Trento, Centrale Fies, Operaestate Festival
With the support of APAP Network Culture Programme of European Union
Produced with the assistance of Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Trento e Rovereto
Anagoor is part of the Fies Factory project
Artist-in-residence programmes
SC – Culture of change | University of Zagreb – Student centre | Zagreb, HR
Tanzfabrik | Berlin, D
Conservatoire de Strasbourg | Strasbourg, F

 

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More on L.I., Lingua Imperii; premises, inspirations and press reviews.

Premises

A bomb in our heart and the memory we are interested in: archiving, memorializing and things immemorable.

The philologist and anthropologist Maurizio Bettini has recently put forward an interpretation of the memory seats in the social imaginary of the ancients, more precisely in the Latin culture. Accordingly, one of the body parts where memory was thought to reside was the ear: to Pliny memory was to be found exactly in the earlobe. In fact, to help somebody recall events, pictures, names or things to memory the Romans used to physically pull their earlobes. It is rather straightforward, then, that a civilization that relied so much on oral tradition and oral lore came to conceive of the pinna (i.e. the visible part of the ear) as the entrance to an archive. The ear was a passage through which information-rich auditory stimuli could be let in and converted to memory, that function specific to the human, a sentient being susceptible to sound.
A second seat of memory was the heart. Evidence thereof lies in the word record (i.e. to remember by storing things somewhere) and its Latin cognate recordari, where the root cord- harks back to the Latin for heart (cor, cordis) and the particle re- indicates a mutual relationship between parts, a sort of turning one’s look towards somebody/something, here specifically towards the intimacy of one’s heart. Thus, the act of (remembering through) recording was seen as healing a rift in the heart.
The two seats already point at two separate ways of conceiving memorization. This distinction is further enhanced by the fact that in numerous European languages, including English, the semantic field of memory makes use of words linked either to memini (I remember in Latin) and mnemosyne (memory in Greek) –which are cognates– or to the Latin word memoria. The latter is often thought to share a common root with the former two, while in fact it has a different origin and meaning: the root *MEN- of the former (memini, mnemosyne as well as the very English word mind) places the seat of the archive and of the storing process in the mind, whereas memoria harks back to the root *(S)MER- which, in words like for instance mesmerize, indicates bewilderment, restlessness, an enchantment, a vortex of emotions. A vortex that, like a bomb, is likely to burst all of a sudden in the recaller’s mind, to attract and disturb him/her at the same time. A vortex that is capable of sucking him/her into a chasm, almost knocking him/her down physically.
Thus we are confronted with two different ideas of memory: on one hand memory is conceived of as an archive, an inert heap, and on the other as a reminiscing process that shakes and upsets.

At the time of the inauguration of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, about seven years ago, Giorgio Agamben wrote on Die Zeit that the monument has a dual nature to it. In fact, according to the philosopher, there would exist two types of human events (and consequently two types of memorials): memorable and immemorable. While the former can be archived and preserved, the latter cannot, due to their sheer enormity that makes them impossible to grasp: their remembrance can only occur through personal experiencing. Always according to Agamben, the Memorial to the Holocaust victims designed by American architect Peter Eisenman, has both features: while the underground chambers would stand for the archival records, the dismaying field of pillars would be capable of eliciting the immemorial.
Piero Terracina, one of the last still alive to have witnessed the horrors of Auschwitz, has said that “memory is the thread tying the past to the present and determining the future.” As a matter of fact, in modern-day society we do celebrate memorial days and festivals of remembrance but how touching are they? They merely manage to struggle against oblivion. Take January 27th, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, for instance: we traditionally equate it with commitment against forgetting, but forgetfulness –odious as it is– is not the major problem. What are we to make of memory if the memory does not flood back in us, forcing us to re-direct our gaze to the heart? If real memory is the thread that ties the past to the present and determines the future, then it arises not from the remembrance, but from the discomfort that the memory itself procures. Memory is the tool that allows us to assess the gap between knowing what truth and righteousness are and the knowledge that our self has –at some point– done wrong.
Convinced though we are that disseminating historical documents is of utmost importance, and that every activity aiming at disseminating information in general is the main path to educating the mind and spirit, we plan with this work of ours to stir memories on a different plane from that of sheer information and narration through documents. We have set up a theatrical journey that in our intention should be capable of eliciting the “immemorial”, that dismaying past deeply buried in our soul, which either because of its being buried deep within us or because of the very nature of all human action is easily forgotten.
Deeply inspired by the first pages of The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi and by his reflections on the elusive human memory, specifically on the memory of the Holocaust, we have chosen to draw on literary works of authors of the subsequent generations, men who did not directly experience that horror, but whose consciousness has felt the need to recall it, no matter how painful that may have been.

Presentation

A tragedy, or the sung lament of the hunting pack: meaning and dramaturgy, setting and performers, overtone singing and a video-clip

What we have set ourselves to achieve is to bring back to life –through a kind of (en)chant(ment)– the memory of those hideous old habits of men’s according to which in the past some of them have turned into predators of other men and, even as late as the twentieth century, soaked the soil of Europe with the blood of millions of people: so much its civil heart as its vast and beautiful forests, reaching as far as its mountainous borders. On stage there has been unleashed a chorus of Erinyes of memory who –before the rekindled memory of their victims– reject their being hunters and lament the burden of guilt for all that cruel hunting.
The Caucasus —easternmost limit of Europe, natural boundary, Mountain of Languages (as it is sometimes known), inextricable tangle of ethnic groups, maze marking and confounding the boundaries at one and the same time— rises as the epicentre of memory and turns into a mythical place of this judgment, much like in Aeschylus’ poetry.
The theatrical form chosen for this creation of ours is the tragic chorus where singing and music, gesture and totemic vision are closely intertwined.
A small community of women and men of various ages shoot their voice-darts in between a jolt to the heart a lament and a dream. The chorus includes a singer of Armenian origin. She is a traditional custodian of an ancient and vast musical heritage, and living memory of a people who was wounded by an unforgotten —yet often shamefully ignored— genocide.
As on the wide central screen the victim’s manifold face gradually emerges, on the two LCD side screens, a struggle unfolds between two Nazi officers, each championing opposing views of life.
L.I., Lingua Imperii, is the language of the empire meant as coercive domination. It is the poor, brutish, deceitful language of the Nazi propaganda. It is the alphabets and the languages taught by force. But it is also a gag imposed as a violent gift by the rulers. Ultimately, it is the very language of violence.

Foto: Anagoor

Foto: Anagoor

The hunt comes to a halt in the Caucasus, mountain of languages

Safe haven since the last glacial period in Eurasia, the Caucasus region has also been a well-known passage for many travellers, traders and conquerors. Yet, although local powers and the adjoining empires have disputed its domination for centuries, the Caucasus has remained a secure shelter for peoples whose identity lies in the about fifty languages spoken in the area. The persistence of such strong ethnic identities is due both to the geographic features of the region, whose mountainous character has been able to isolate and protect the various groups, and to a type of society whose ties and cultural codes of loyalty to the clan have always been as strong as –if not stronger than– those towards the nation and the region itself. The attempts that have been made so far, especially by the Soviet Union, to assimilate and dominate the Caucasians have all been in vain.
As the author Jonathan Littell describes with a wealth of historical documents in his disturbing novel The Kindly Ones, the very hunt for Jews by the Nazi meets a resounding setback before the tangle of ethnic groups, the religious syncretism, the stratification of beliefs and the crossings of languages of the Caucasus. In the novel the young German linguist Voss, who is serving as an SS officer, is asked by a military commission to provide scientific evidence of the alleged Jewish ancestry of some mountain people, the purpose of course being their complete annihilation. But the fancy theoretical castles in the air of the commission come crashing down when faced by brute fact. The young linguist, definitely unwilling to align with Nazi ideology, delivers –with scientific precision and consistency– a dizzying survey of languages and dialects and a comprehensive account of the centuries of separations and intersections between the peoples in the area. Much to the indignation of the SS officer in charge of the commission, the linguist dismisses the Nazi theory of race, Volk and the purported “nativeness” of the Germanic tribes as veterinary philosophy.
The backbone of the entire project is provided by three dialogues between the SS Hauptsturmführer Aue and Leutnant Voss, set between the spring of 1942 and the autumn of that year during the operations of penetration in the Caucasian region by the German Forces in the southern sector of the Eastern Front.

Man-hunting and the mountain of boundaries

To talk about manhunts is to talk about one fragment of a long history of violence on the part of the dominant.  The manhunt must not be understood here as a metaphor. It refers to concrete historical phenomena in which human beings were tracked down, captured, or killed in accord with the forms of the hunt; these were regular and sometimes large-scale practices whose forms were first theorized in ancient Greece, long before their enormous expansion in the modern period in conjunction with the development of transatlantic capitalism.
The Italian word caccia, whose closest English cognate (via the French language) is chase, means two things: on the one hand it designates the action of hunting, particularly with regard to game animals, on the other it refers to the action of chasing out by means of violence or coercion, forcing to leave a certain place. There is a hunt of pursuit and a hunt of expulsion; hunting that captures and hunting that excludes. These two operations are distinct but may enter into a relationship of complementarity: hunting human beings often presupposes that they have been previously chased out, expelled, or excluded from society, from a common order. Every hunt is accompanied by a theory of its prey that explains why, by virtue of what difference, of what distinction, some men can be hunted and others not. And it also explains who has the power to determine and establish such distinctions and lines of demarcation.
The history of man-hunting is thus a history not only of the techniques of tracking and capture but also of procedures of exclusion, of lines of demarcation drawn within the human community in order to define the humans who can be hunted.
In this sense the Caucasus, being itself a geographical boundary, with its secluded valleys and gorges that potentially assure protection and separation to the different language families, while at the same time sharing a history of hybridization of peoples, perfectly embodies the symbol both of “boundary and separation” and the dissolution of boundaries, of their senselessness,
It might be no coincidence that it was to a rock in the Caucasus that Aeschylus chose to bind his Prometheus, the Titan of boundaries who broke Zeus’ order giving Man not only fire but also the insurmountable boundary of mortality.
The arrogance that makes some men stand high above heaps of corpses against the sky springs from a blind pride, from considering themselves holders of that power of distinction that is Order, from the triumphant drunkenness of wielding the power of life and death. Hermann Göring, who called himself Reichsjägermeister, that is “the Reich’s hunt-master”, evidently pledging allegiance to the myth of Nimrod the Mighty Hunter, said “I decide who is a Jew and who is an Aryan.”

The Mighty Hunter, cynegetic power and the mountain of corpses

Originally the project L.I. was to be called Nimrod.
Who was Nimrod?
We learn his story in the Book of Genesis. He was the founder of Babel and the first king that the earth has ever known. “He was the first to be a despot on the earth”, “a mighty hunter before God”, the Bible reads.
In what sense is Nimrod called a hunter?
With that word the Scriptures do not designate a hunter of animals, but a hunter of men. It is in this sense that he is “a mighty hunter”, whereas David is “a shepherd of peoples”.
His name means “rebellion”. As a matter of fact, he disobeyed the order that God had directed to men to leave and populate the Earth after the Flood. He gathered men by force: in order to become king he subdued them with violence.
Nimrod revels in abducting people: that is the way in which he obtains his subjects. He reigns over Babel but he periodically plunges into the space outside to hunt down his prey, which he then shuts up inside his walls. In contrast to David’s pastoral power, his is a cynegetic power, a movement for annexation that constantly appropriates outside in order to accumulate inside: he hunts and builds at the same time, or –rather– he hunts in order to build. Cynegetic power gathers together what is scattered, centralizes it, heaps it up in a limitless logic of accumulation. That is the image of Babel, where the pile of game humans is replaced by a vertical piling-up that will ultimately “reach unto heaven”.
The biblical account of the masses enslaved by Nimrod and the large tower-pile soaring up into the heavens as an overt symbol of the king-hunter’s hubris bear a grim resemblance to the heaps of corpses produced by the meaningless genocides that the history of the twentieth century has sadly witnessed.

 

Sources and inspiration

L.I. LINGUA IMPERII feeds on the words, thoughts and works of W.G. Sebald, Jonathan Littel, Primo Levi, Eschilo, Martha C. Naussbaum, Grégoire Chamayou, William T. Vollmann, Komitas Vardapet, Markus Schinwald, Jay Roemblatt, Grossman Vasilij, Susan Silas, Robert S. C. Gordon, Collier Schorr, Mario Casella, René Girard, Tzvetan Todorov, Bruno Bettlheim, The Caretaker, Claude Lanzmann, August Sander, last but not least, Victor Klemperer.

Press reviews

http://www.anagoor.com/spettacoli/Lingua%20Imperii/Pdf%20L.I.%20pressHQ.pdf

L.I. | LINGUA IMPERII
cultureteatrali.org – 05.09.2012

by Silvia Mei

“Compared to the previous work Fortuny, which many unfairly singled out as an haughty work stuffed with sterile academicism and decadent aestheticism, Lingua Imperii modulates different registers and languages, never naively symmetric, using the fixed device ( à la Copeau) of their usual displays, here arranged in triptych, central giant panel with side wings as miniature paintings or portrait frames: now a gate to somewhere else, windows on an external place, now tableaux vivants, resembling, not so unlikely, the modern tablet, the Tables of the law or Minoan-Mycenaean tablets, bearing the archaic form of the ancient Greek. […] L.I. Lingua Imperii however does not aim at speaking about linguistic minorities, though the problem of the ‘people-country-language’ triad is often used. Least of all it is not a work on Memory or more generally speaking on memory. It is rather a learned and critical travel which stimulates it, which puts it as a frame to a debate anything but celebratory, far from common beliefs. Recovering the atrocities of ex-Yugoslavia war, the Chechen claims and the Armenian question, Anagoor reminds us how much still now many stories of violence, racism and discrimination should be told, studied, written and possibly translated in all possible languages, against every dangerous myth on originality and purity, imaginary constructions that encourage xenophobic cosmogonies”.

L.I. | LINGUA IMPERII
Il Giornale di Vicenza – 29.08.2012

di Lorenzo Parolin

Identity and dictatorial madness. Anagoor’s Lingua Imperii is a masterpiece.

“Promising scholars before, now adults. With “Lingua Imperii”, “Anagoor” put an important milestone on the road to maturity and the word masterpiece can be used here without any doubts. […] The theme of the show is the relationship between language, power and identity, and the company does it with courage and originality. The common thread is a film adaptation (also by Anagoor) of “The Kindly ones” by Jonathan Littell. The scene shows an SS officer, Captain Aue (Hannes Perkmann) discussing with the Wehrmacht lieutenant, Voss (Benno Steinegger). Both are at the front during the Caucasus war operations and they discover a different reality than expected. [...] On stage the show is very emotional and alternates video projections, acting and original music by Paola Dallan. There are references to the classic literature (the myth of Iphigenia), Shakespeare and to various genocides perpetrated in Europe during its history. The performance is tough but is far from being mere erudition. All the digressions, in other words, are “learned”, meaning that they are congruent to what the show tries to communicate. [...] It is a strong work that goes right to the heart of the issues and to the heart of the audience,  which has indeed rewarded the young actors with applause and tears. [...] “Lingua Imperii”, is an excellent work in which the performers on stage (Anna Bragagnolo, Mattia Beraldo, Moreno Callegari, Marco Crosato, Paola Dallan, Marco Menegoni, Eliza Oanca, Monica Tonietto and marvelous Armenian singer Gayanée Movsisyan) and director Simone Derai have reaped the fruits of their work, thanks to their deep studies . is that all? No, because Anagoor, has been working for years with the high school students of their home town of Castelfranco, and have selected four very young students who also act in this performance This is also a positive sign for a country that is suffering from aging. Bravi. Bravissimi”.

L.I. | LINGUA IMPERII
La Repubblica – 05.08.2012

by Anna Bandettini

“[…] it seems that for the Venetian Anagoor a new phase of maturity has begun. L.I. Lingua Imperii, which we have seen in Fies, is an outstandingly rigorous work – as in its literary sources: Aeschylus, Jonathan Littell, Sebald, Vollman, Primo Levi – which talks about power and language, of ferocity and survival. […] This is a performance that contains harrowing moments (the fifteen advice for the grieving parent, the view on the concentration camps…) and no easy consolation”.

L.I. | LINGUA IMPERII
Il Gazzettino – 29.07.2012

by Paolo Crespi

Anagoor, the “lingua imperii” which tells the unspeakable.
“Caucasus, spring-autumn 1942. At the foot of “the mountain of the languages”, more than fifty idioms, resisting in a cultural and ethnic crossroads, impenetrable to any attempt of standardization by the dominus of the moment, two Nazi officers, a simple serviceman and a fine linguist working under the insignia of the Third Reich, discuss about human races and about the groundless probability of “scientifically” isolating stocks of Jewish descent which had to be hit and quickly sent to extermination.
Their recorded dialogs, taken from “The Kindly Ones” by Jonathan Littell and offered to the spectators (in a sort of juxtaposed field-reverse shot) on two separate screens on the sides of the stage, are the anchor of a masterful performance that otherwise moves on the accumulation of fragments, verbal, visual, sound evocations, intense and beautiful projections, not only formal, inspired by the myth of innocence, which is  violated for all sentient beings.
Italy, summer 2012: for Anagoor, “L. I., Lingua imperii”, just presented at the Dro Festival – Centrale Fies, after the preview at the Trento Film Festival and waiting to arrive, on 27th August, at Operaestate, Bassano del Grappa, is the fulfillment of that project of political theater from which the company from Castelfranco Veneto started twelve years ago. The demanding theme of Shoah is interwined with the vaster one of the “manhunt”, a slaughter without boundaries nor setbacks throughout history, from the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the Armenian genocide, to the Srebrenica massacre. On the scene, nine actors-witnesses experience the unspeakable through a new and wise use of the voice that sometimes is amplified into wind, a solar storm capable of obscuring for a long moment the spectator’s sky and horizon, who also remains dumb, sympathetic, emotionally shocked. Not to be missed”.

L.I. | LINGUA IMPERII
myword.it – 14.05.2012

by Renato Palazzi

Anagoor’s heart of darkness
“One feels the need to think for long after seeing Lingua Imperii, the new creation by Anagoor presented in a sort of preview in the unusual location of the Trento Film Festival: you feel this need because it is one of the most interesting shows of the season, you feel this need because it reveals the surprising maturation process completed in a few months by a young group with enormous talent, which hitherto had struggled a bit to find its own direction, but you feel this need especially since this complex scenic construction which assembles many materials, so many techniques, so many different suggestions, suggests broader observations about theater and how it is done today”.

L.I. | LINGUA IMPERII
Il Sole24Ore – 06.05.2012

by Renato Palazzi

Language, hunt and power
“To those who doubts that the Italian theater is going through a phase of extraordinary creative vitality, to those who still do not believe that a decisive generational change is happening – which is also a shift in perspective, of the aesthetic – I would suggest to look the very beautiful Lingua Imperii by Anagoor: a concentrated exemplum of the forms of expression that are used today – no plot to represent, no characters to play, but a pure composition of verbal, visual and sound fragments – married to a depth of thought that places the group to the top of the new national scene. […] The structure is given by three brilliant dialogues taken from The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell in which two Nazi officers, a simple soldier and a scholar of linguistics, in ’42, in the Caucasus, discuss from two different screens whether it is possible to recognize a Jewish ethnicity from its language. Between them the sacrifice of Iphigenia, murdered like a lamb, and the story of Saint Julian’s cruel and furious slaughter of living creatures of every kind. The descent of the director Simone Derai and his companions in the depths of the soul grows with an impressive crescendo: this dense intellectual journey has moments of almost unbearable emotion, as in the scene of the fifteen recommendations to the parent who has lost a child, repeated in different languages ​​or in excruciating movies of boys and girls with wreaths of flowers on their heads and atrocious muzzles on their faces. In the end, the endless sequences of a deer in the mountains, both indifferent and tacitly questioning, makes you go home with a sense of persistent discomfort.”