XIV International School of Performance
“There is no art without a dance with death,” writes Kurt Vonnegut in *Slaughterhouse-Five*, one of the greatest anti-war novels of the 20th century, though little known in Italy. The endless city he describes is Dresden, but Vonnegut’s Dresden is symbolic here: it represents all the places, countries, and worlds torn apart by war.
One prepares for war. A continuous strategic game of seduction and power. Weapons are built, rhetoric is invented, we speak of ideals of homeland and heroes, justifications, reasons, and motives for killing are drafted, the war machine is packaged as a seductive and intoxicating mechanism that, once triggered, does nothing but exterminate. But little attention is paid to what remains. The uniforms of the war dead are replaced by a new kind of uniform: the black of the widows and mothers who multiply on stage until they become an unstoppable army. To them, the widows, only the fallen soldier’s dog tag will remain, a meager token to mark the end of a life. It is precisely these tags that symbolize the performance: insignificant little squares of aluminum, like dog tags, through which the individual is stripped of his humanity and reduced to a number. A dog thrown into the fray. An animal for slaughter.
When
July 15, 2005 – July 17, 2005
Where
Poggio Salamartano and Piazza V. Veneto – Fucecchio
