μονάς (monás) THE REAL SUBSTANCE OF THINGS

μονάς (monàs) —the real substance of things

by Teatringestazione (ª)

Conception, care and execution Gesualdi | Trono

Dramaturg Loretta Mesiti

"The spectator's consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speakers who unilaterally surround him with their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle, in its entirety, is his «mirror image». Here, the stage is set with the false exit of generalised autism." (218, IX, The Society of Spectacle, Guy Debord, 1967.)

Monàs attempts to focus on the statute of the image and its political and social significance, investigating the gap between reality and post-truth and how, in this fracture, an exercise of power is suffered or practised.

The "nomadic" spectators enter a stage space broken down into elementary functions. They can spontaneously choose to occupy the different fractions of the space, inhabiting it in action, observation, reading, listening, and moving freely between one function and another, staying in a single fraction or rejoining the previous ones if necessary. The space is divided into two parts by a septum/screen, which houses a video projection, the same on both sides. On one side of the screen is the action space, and on the other, the contemplation space. On the action side, the limited number of spectators are wearing headphones, listening to techno music (Turbocapitalism Continuum, Amptek), and are in front of a video camera that captures their figure in real-time, returns an image transfigured by software, which increases the exposure time, decreasing the number of frames per second, fragmenting the movement, until it loses definition and beyond, until body parts disappear. The result is an image with a tragic quality, as opposed to the movement "in real-time," which is ridiculous. On the side of contemplation, the spectators sit in front of the screen, which shows the projection of what is happening in the action space while listening to the audio of Debord's film "On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time" (1957), whose text has been fragmented and recombined by the random function of a music player. In this work, "Debord captures the city as a metaphor for the world and throws in captions, learned quotations, images of ordinary banalities." (Pino Bertelli 2015). An author's "desertion".

When spectators move into the contemplation space, they leave their headphones available for those who wish to take their place. They can then return when a headphone is available again.

While the spectators spontaneously inhabit the scenic space, the performer, through a singular and exclusive relationship with his double on the screen, works on the processing and collection of gestures that nourish the composition of a recursive discourse depicted on the screen, a mise en abyme (t/n: play-within-a-play).

The performer's body writes and inscribes itself among the mass of passers-by "in a given unit of time". A "provisional micro-society" (Debord 1959) is created. The porous dance receives the gestures of the spectator-participants in a reciprocal interference, redefining the figures on the screen, which together form an "anthropic" panorama: a landscape made up of figures "á la dérive" (t/n: adrift), fictitious identities or copies of real identities, unrecognisable faces, bodies fragmented by the focal aperture of the camera, unfinished presences that in front of the screen remain evocation and representation. The individual contributes to the background, the mass becomes an echo, a premonition. "Being' is a chase after superimposition, the cancellation of the figures on the screen. To subtract oneself means eliminating one's figure from the landscape, with all this entails. A fragmentation of the self into an infinite range of coexisting identities occurs. And when the game is consumed in repetition, the true substance of things appears.

Monàs is conceived as a hybrid work combining participatory installation, choreographic composition and live cinema: a performative work (Mengotti 2020).

The research makes use of the spatial and interactive space dispositif "Not Found" (ᵇ), which originated from an investigation into "the Society of the Spectacle" (Debord, 1967). A space of action, observation and contemplation, which simultaneously welcomes performers and visitors. A dimension of publicity and sharing is constituted in a space arranged around a screen. An element of separation/transmission/diffusion, whose presence separates and relates a series of places, defines asymmetrical modes of relation, multiplies the thresholds between action and contemplation. This scenic apparatus offers us an opportunity to examine the conditions of our own presence and its political meaning in a space of coexistence; a true ecosystem, within which it is possible to reflect on the relationship between real space and space of representation.

The dispositif creates a heterotopia, where the image finds its concreteness in the mediation of the machine that forces the participant to find the position and movement that makes the image meaningful. The mechanism is implemented through the subtraction of movement, as we understand it composed of instants that mark consequential moments of action. The apparatus makes the movement fluid by creating a trail that erases the instants, making visible only the moments in which the body is truly still. To exist, to find a definition, we must deform the way we move or exasperate movement. In this way, the image materialises on the screen; but this deformation makes the screen a heterotopia, taking away its sense and meaning from real movement. We are therefore faced with the choice of existing in one world or the other since both are only possible in inaction, in "posing".