wwWoyzeck brain-matters and mind-stuff_ part two: Fucecchio

Articolo non ancora tradotto

To paint a murderer give me first of all a man

Monday July, 8. Woyzeck and I enter the balding gardens of a small Tuscan town, the land of my ancestors. With us, forty-three performers have congregated from various parts of Wales, Italy, USA and other corners of Europe. We have invaded the "Bombicci Gardens", perhaps the seediest part of town. Here, at night, a population of minor junkies and down-and-outs emerge from the cracks in the walls and replace geraniums, toddlers and little old ladies gossiping on benches. The gardens too are a map, a grid, a sculpted universe.

Historically, they were a cloister, a farm, a thouroughfare. For us, they are a container, a public and private space. The gardens are delimited East by new houses; West by the old walls, the remains of a Camaldolese Convent; South, by an imposing cement building: the Excelsior, the local Erotic Cinema. Rows of small square windows, not bigger than a handkerchief, function as frames for promiscuous figures, legs and arms in silhouette, animate and inanimate objects passing by the windows like the shadows in a cave. Our Babel of languages rises up from the middle of the gardens to mix in with TV voices and the clattering of pasta pots.


Our Italian journey has key-words as stations:
Water
Woods, knife
Birds,
Nuns, Materasses and blankets
Some of these emerged straight out of the text.
But others: like nuns and birds, where do they come from? Why do they feature so prominently in my vision?The memory of the place, perhaps?
In a casual conversation at an open air concert, a retired primary school teacher tells me that in the gardens there used tobenuns, the order of St. Romuald. When the convent was closed, the gardens were bought by the Bombicci Family. As he is still speaking, I visualise a row of white nuns sitting on the window-ledges at the back of the porno cinema.

Later, I read that St. Romuald retired to the marshes through horror at his father's having killed a man in a duel.

Murder and water reappear.

Tuesday, July 9.

The room at the top of the empty museum in Fucecchio, where we had our first production meetings, is full of stuffed birds belonging to the City Council. They are being restored. The impression they have on me is frightening: I looked around and found that I was being watched by Woyzeck and the Captain and the Doctor and the Professor with all the students. Caught in their haughty or humble gaze, the birds stared back at me like a gallery of portraits.


In Italy, Woyzeck evolves as a bird-of-prey, precariously perched on trees, removed, in waiting. If the dark, underground labyrinth of corridors in Indianapolis harboured a Woyzeck-rat, here we make our acquaintance with a Woyzeck-bird. In Indy, ex-soldier and barber Woyzeck scrambled in sand and mud, ferreted amongst the scrap metal and urban debris of the catacombs' red-light district. In Fucecchio, Woyzeck-bird rises out of the woods and continuing his metaphorical flight upwards, ascends the walls of the grey porno-cinema in a 3-metre-diameter white dress.


I manage to speak to the porno-manager. He is totally on our side. He says " I give people what they want. Men from all walks of life come here to forget who they are". He takes us for a tour of the cinema. Outside first, around the battlements of the back wall which is part of our "set". Then inside. As I stand gaping at the rather cold and shabby pole-dancing catwalk and thinking "Woyzeck would definetely come here", the manager points up and says "Watch! First, a clank. Then a metal roof slowly opens some thirty metres above our heads flooding the place with natural light and flocks of birds.

He turns and asks: why did you choose this place?
Yes why? How? I cast my mind back to a night in March 2002.


First of all there is an instinct. The scent of a new vision one can barely smell. I was seduced by chance when, hurriedly walking back to my car, I happened to cross these lost and forgotten gardens. I suddenly lift my head and there, before my eyes, a vision: a factory, a prison, a Berlin wall, a majestic and imposing futuristic building, ugly yet terribly alluring because mute, answer-less, mysterious, with doubly locked doors to protect its contents from enquiring eyes. The only opening, a tiny window at the top, the thoroughfare of discreet travelling pigeons.


I'm stunned. How come I never saw this place before? There is something seedy and lurid and at the same time clean and clinical about this building. Like Hamlet's ghost, it's asking me to listen to its secret.


Monday, July 15. The words of Marie's lullaby seize my imagination. I can only see gypsies around me. This Woyzeck has a distinct gypsy feel.


If you don't close the window tight
The gypsy boy will come at night
And he will take you by the hand
And lead you off to gypsy land.


Wednesday, July 17. The gardens are now ploughed by a crossroads of rivers and an 8-metre table, hollowed and filled with water, will catch fire at the gypsy wedding. The cast have metamorphosed from an ungamely group bumping and tripping over each other into a collective of compelling individuals carving out the space as if they had lived in these gardens all their lives. Our vaguely yeddish, live band takes over while Woyzeck and Marie get married in the fairground-gypsy-camp.

Thursday, July 18. I'm furiously planting islands of decoy ducks in the ground to get over my disappointment. The opera-horses promised by the Comunale in Florence will not arrive after all. It's the night of our dress rehearsal but Goran Bregovic, the Slav musician that filled Kusturica's films with wild gypsy music, is playing three hundred yards down the road from us. We have to go. The dress rehearsal will start at 2am, after the concert.

Friday, July 19 and Saturday, July 20. Over two hundred people cross our river to watch Woyzeck-David climbing up to heaven in his white dress. As the gypsies disperse out of vision, and our real horse peacefully turns to stare at the audience, Woyzeck's last words from the roof-top are: "I killed, yes. But I killed for love".

When
Settembre 2002
Where
New Welsh Review