COSÌ VICINO, COSÌ LONTANO

with young and old people of the city of Parma

produced by Fondazione Teatro Due

SPAZIO BIGNARDI

Così vicino così lontano is the end of a long theatre travel that started a year ago with around 40 university students, 7 children and many elderly people od the city of Parma. It all started an observation: the absent  of a relationship between those who are at the start of their life and those who keeps the memory and secrets of life. Children and elderly people. And between them, that youth that already was and has yet to become. Three different ages that inhabit our cities, divided, distant from each other but, all in all, close to each other.
A first part was dedicated to exploration: we went, in small groups of students and children to visit elderly people in retirement homes, dance halls and clubs of the city; then we invited them to come and be our guests at Teatro Due. A way to connect many different places of the city.
In the end, we brought them together on the stage.

Inspired by Peter Handke’s “The hour we knew nothing of each other”, we created a world between dream and reality that portrays the life a square of any possible city of the world. There, in that imaginary place, bodies, stories, ghosts fight and look for a lost unity. Old people, young people, children like straight lines barely touching each other and never meet. The empty space of theatre becomes a place to inhabit but also to possess, in a fight for survival.
But is death still an enemy?
Maybe we aren’t able to unite things we see, all we see is differences.
Maybe we created supermarket’s categories everywhere while life is flowing underneath our fears.
Maybe we can imagine new possibilities of existing, of politics, of poetry and of reality.
Maybe.
It is a chance.
It is far.
It is close.
It is.
Maybe.

 Vincenzo Picone