lorenzo gleijeses

In September 2015, in the corridor leading to Odin Teatret kitchen, I found myself vis-à-vis Lorenzo Gleijeses and Mirto Baliani. They were in residence at the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium in Holstebro, concentrating on some scenes previously developed with the Italian choreographer Michele di Stefano. They took advantage of this permanence to show their work to Julia Varley who, since 2002, has directed Lorenzo in two performances. I like Lorenzo. I appreciate his human and professional qualities. He is patient towards the work, able to guess what the process is pointing to, ready to embrace an unexpected situation even though he cannot dominate it rationally. He possesses the actor’s greatest virtue: he knows how to resist the temptation to be satisfied with the first result. Lorenzo is an amphibious actor, able to live in the vast waters of traditional theatre and on the floating islands of the Third Theatre. Son of well-known actors, just eighteen years old, Lorenzo threw himself into a path of “work on himself” led by Julia. The training of the body-mind and the voice, typical of Odin Teatret and many other theatre groups, resulted in an actor dramaturgy. By this term I mean the actor’s ability to independently create materials: ways of moving, walking, behaving, talking, writing or selecting prose or poetry, improvising scenes, fixing them and distilling them. The final text emerges gradually from these materials born out of imagination and individual experience, thus giving birth to the character. I could say that there is a theatre that works for the text, interpreting and adapting it to historical and aesthetical circumstances close to us; and a theatre that works with the text whose strength is one of the many forces that make up the performance, a living organism that releases energy. One day Julia, due to a commitment in town, asked me to observe the work of Lorenzo and Mirto. I was baffled. There were only six movements repeated maniacally throughout space in endless variations. My attention faded until complete extinction. I told Lorenzo that I couldn’t see anything in those abstract movements. I had only a vague association when he was on the ground and writhed like a cockroach upside down on his back. Jokingly, I told him he could call his performance The Metamorphosis, according to Franz Kafka’s story. Meyerhold used to say that you should never joke with pedants, because they take everything literally. Lorenzo is not a pedant. You can name what he is since the next day, in the same corridor, he asked me to see how he had adapted his materials to the text of The Metamorphosis. During the night he had recorded Kafka’s text that now an off-screen voice recounted during his contortions on the floor. The result was embryonic, I didn’t recognise if it was male or female, what it wanted to become, whether it had enough vitality to grow in the future. I was, however, impressed by the determination of Lorenzo and Mirto who in one single night had turned an ironic comment into a stage reality: a standpoint. I observed their work a couple of times, commenting on it vaguely. For my part there was a boundless sympathy for those two workaholic night owls, and no desire to get involved. When he left Holstebro, Lorenzo asked me if he could show me the development of his materials when I was in Italy. Of course, I replied, well aware of the difficulty to find free time when I tour with Odin Teatret. I teased him: Was he betraying the choreographer with a theatre director? He replied seriously that he imagined giving two different destinies to those six abstract movements. I liked his definition of betrayal: choosing a different destiny. In the spring of 2016 Lorenzo called me on the phone: were Julia and I willing to give a public master class? He would present the materials of The Metamorphosis and we two would intervene as directors: shorten and modify the scenes, come with proposals, elaborate details, sharpen the rhythm and suggest intonations. In short, a rehearsal open to spectators, just a few hours during a single evening. The International Festival of Naples was interested to include this rehearsal in its programme as a master class. In June 2016, during that evening at the Galleria Toledo Theatre in Naples, I witnessed the long journey undergone by Lorenzo and Mirto since I saw them last in Holstebro. The tiny embryo had grown, showing off new features and cadences, a profile of dynamic and evocative patterns with a potential of images that aroused my desire to accompany their development. Thus Lorenzo, Mirto, Julia and I – and the indefatigable alter ego Manolo Muoio – decided that, together, we would let the performance grow. We confirmed the title: An ordinary day of the dancer Gregor Samsa. It would be a collective creation. We brainwashed ourselves to discover periods in our calendar when we could meet, and ways to proceed even at a distance. Whatsapp and email, video and skype can help, but do not transmit pulsating energy. Lorenzo and Mirto had the responsibility of exploring and making the embryo grow. It was their task to add texts, invent scenes, music, introduce other partners – technological objects or gadgets. The real difficulty was to find periods, even short ones, to cancel the 2,000 kilometers that separated us, and restore the intense intimacy of rehearsing applying the essential principle of shaping, turning upside down, trimming. To remove is to add, to add is to remove. It was a totally unusual and unsettling situation for me, used to accompany the actors and the growth of a performance day after day during several months. We managed to rehearse five days in Rome at the Teatro Quirino in June 2017 and for an equally long period in Naples in March 2018. Lorenzo came to Holstebro a week in September of the same year. In the end, again in Naples, we met for nine days in November 2018. Lorenzo continued to work in Italy with Mirto and Manolo. He sent regularly to Julia and me via WhatsApp new texts or changed scenes, receiving in return comments and indications. When preparing a performance, there is always a moment of truth. In such a way the decisive confrontation between the bull and the toreador is called in a bullfight, when the toreador, with a swift, fierce stock, pierces the animal’s heart with his short sword. In theatre, the moment of truth is usually the encounter with the spectators. But not always. Sometimes it is in all other circumstances that the actor reveals his artistic commitment and spirit of sacrifice towards the embryo that he has nurtured until to give it an autonomous identity of theatrical fiction. The moment of truth took place between June 23 and 29, 2018. Once again, the International Festival of Naples supported the project of Lorenzo and his company. During a week, about thirty actors, directors and playwrights followed the rehearsals of the A ordinary day of the dancer Gregor Samsa. The venue was the NEST, Napoli Est Teatro. In the welcoming home of this enterprising collective, a “Collective Mind” took place. The announcement of participation explained the procedure: In theatre, we can speak of a “Collective Mind” when an ensemble of motivated people is engaged in a creative process which doesn’t aim at realising an already clearly defined project. A “Collective Mind” integrates different specialisations, various degrees of experience and diverse responsibilities in an assembling process similar to that which happens in the individual mind in the course of invention: sudden changes of direction, detours, exploitation of serendipitous effects, leaps from one level of organisation to another (pre-expressive level, organic dramaturgy, narrative dramaturgy, shaping of the space, musical universe, etc.). The “Collective Mind” operates with the same amount of energy in programming as in knowing how to demolish its own programmes. After attending the rehearsals, the participants will gather to ask questions and discuss the day’s work with Eugenio Barba and his collaborators and will have the opportunity to suggest changes and new directions. During the rehearsals, new narrative threads emerge, mix and get lost. At the same time the “Collective Mind” tries to deepen and elaborate the materials already developed. New solutions, techniques and attempts are proposed that can reveal where these materials may lead, which new stories trigger and which could be the most appropriate endings. Three months had passed since our quintet had rehearsed during five intense days in March. We had established the structure from which to distil the final part of the performance. We departed giving Lorenzo and Mirto free hands to make further proposals. At NEST, I anticipated the pleasure of the novelties with which they would surprise me. I was dismayed. In a burst of creativity, Lorenzo and Mirto had smashed and reshaped the entire structure, infusing into it, a completely different meaning. Lorenzo showed Julian me the new and final phase of the performance. The silence lasted a long time. I felt behind me the impact caused in the participants of the “Collective Mind”. Julia waited apprehensively my reactions. Lorenzo and Mirto waited confidently my appreciation for the radical transformation they had managed to achieve. How to say that I felt betrayed? What words could express my regret over a deep expectation that had been cheated? What had disappeared from the previous version that I had kept alive inside me for months and months, filing a detail, a pause, an attitude? I asked Lorenzo the reason for the radical change in the structure we had agreed. His arguments were relevant and the results attested their effectiveness. The reactions of the participants were a proof of this. But I lacked the discomfort and irritation that Kafka’s text provoked in me. Now the absurd story of a man who becomes an insect no longer bothered me. I was not shaking skeptically my head, in dismay, almost panic, something that concerned me directly, though I didn’t understand why. Was the reptile part of my brain no longer reacting? Was the literary metaphor just a conceptual construction, artistically well packaged, but no longer “biting my flesh”. A spectator, once, gave me this definition, in order to measure a performance. I explained to Lorenzo and Mirto that we had to forget their version and reconstruct the previous one. At that moment I admired Lorenzo and appreciated his strength. He replied only: I agree, let’s start to rebuild it. And we succeeded during that week thanks to his superhuman effort. In Lugano, a city that in the past housed the Italian anarchists in exile, one day Julia met a friend who asked her: is it true that Eugenio is betraying his actors and does a performance outside his theatre? He was telling the truth: for 55 years I only staged Odin Teatret actors and Asian masters from the Theatrum Mundi Ensemble. Why did I betray my habit, vocation or laziness? There are betrayals that are a pleasure, and betrayals that are an escape. Betrayals that are a form of renewal, or the choice of a different destiny. But the betrayal of Julia and mine with Lorenzo, Mirto and Manolo was a return home to my world. What world does my theatre belong to? If it were an element – earth, water, fire, air – it would be the sea. I don’t know the art of staying afloat alone. I look for the hand of another – a desperate, confident, ambitious or naive individual, deeply hurt or wanting to escape. An individual who is ready to push the sea with me towards that muscle which pumps blood. And when, exhausted, we feel that it is impossible, the sea is a drop that drips blue on the cheek of a spectator. It sounds sentimental, but the effort is worth it. (Eugenio Barba)

Looking at the performance An Ordinary Day of the Dancer Gregorio Samsa and the physical assurance with which Lorenzo Gleijeses moves on stage today, it is difficult for me to remember the sensation I had when I first met him during a workshop. He was the perfect image of a new-born foal that can barely stand on its thin legs. I was in Naples on tour with Odin Teatret’s performance Mythos, organised by Galleria Toledo in 2002, and the workshop was at the Mercadante Theatre. At the end of the class, shy and respectful, Lorenzo accompanied me to the tram I took to go back to my mother’s house. He wanted to get closer to me, talk and strengthen our contact. He had been moved by how I had put my hands on his shoulders and back while listening to his voice, trying to induce tenderness, confidence and energy without useless tensions. On the other hand, I clearly remember the puzzled expression full of wonder that I have seen many times since on Lorenzo’s face. I asked him on the first day of the workshop to repeat the scene he had just done. “But how can I, if I don’t feel it? I need time to find the motivation again…” He came from a school where emotions were the support to lean on; physical behaviour was the unconscious result of what the actor felt. Lorenzo didn’t remember how he had gone down on the ground, he didn’t even remember bending his knees. I had to patiently guide him, step by step. I have often experienced the incredulous expression of young actors who look at me as if I were a Martian when I explain to them that my attention is directed to the spectators and to what they feel and perceive, each one in a different way. My aspiration is to give the spectator the chance to live an experience in which a scene’s form and rhythm launches a message to be deciphered. It is not the meaning or the story that determines communication, but the energy, intonation and succession of impulses that compose the physical living and animal language. I wonder if Lorenzo would have been so full of respect if he had known how many times in the years to come I would have said to him: “repeat; once again; one more time”. It is difficult to manage to work with me as a director because I give priority to my work as an actress and to Odin Teatret. Despite this, I have directed many performances. Various actresses and some actors have approached me over the years. They follow me wherever I am in the world, they ask me for advice and tasks, they force me to look at them and guide them in my free time and during the holidays; until the attachment’s outcome is stage material that claims the right to live, grow and be loved, as children do, even those born out of wedlock. Once a scene exists, once the ideas have turned into actions, and that the tasks – given quickly because of lack of time – have materialised before my eyes into concrete proposals, I feel the responsibility to accompany the progression of the performance and finish it. The consequence is a process that lasts a long time, with intermittent rehearsals that continue for two or three years. But the real frustration comes later, when I don’t have time to follow the performance when it is presented to spectators. Experience teaches me that my way of working – and ours at Odin Teatret – needs time, both for the process of creation and for the ripening of the result. The actor must appropriate the stage material, repeat it until s/he forgets the thousands of details that make up the performance, incorporate all the corrections and elaborations received from the outside until they become her/his own. Only after about fifty repetitions have I seen the performances I have directed ‘fly’. But unfortunately, we live in a time when after having finished a performance and presenting it a few times, one immediately moves on to another project. The continuity of development that the stable environment of a theatre group offers is difficult to maintain. The patience of waiting for the results to appear exactly when you do not expect them is a luxury that few can afford or that few are willing to defend with the necessary stubbornness. Lorenzo Gleijeses and Manolo Muoio have followed me in two such processes for the performances Gertrude’s Son and Exhausted Man or the Deep Blue. We have a shared background of hours and hours of misunderstandings and discoveries, doubts and complicity, silences and sweat, obstinacy and temptation to desist, material constraints and invention of impossible possibilities. In Gertrude’s Son, I fixed Lorenzo’s rhythm, which had a tendency of getting faster, with a soundtrack that lasted the whole duration of the performance. Lorenzo had to learn always to follow and dialogue with music and sounds, despite the emotional commitment of the scenes and despite Manolo’s external help who sometimes anticipated or cut the sound. In Exhausted Man or the Deep Blue, we used shadows and video, lights and a challenging set that required patience and training from all of us. We worked a long time on the text, on the calm but audible way of saying it, maintaining an intimate space without shouting. Then we come up against the difficulty of selling and distributing the performances. Today, true creativity is revealed in knowing how to invent projects and contexts that solve economic and organisational issues and allow actors to be on stage in front of spectators. My name as a director does not sell in traditional and experimental theatre environments. So Lorenzo and Manolo followed other strategies to make theatre and our collaboration was interrupted for some time; but we continued to meet each time it was possible, and also to present my book Stones of Water, published in Italian by Franco Quadri, written in part exactly to answer the questions put to me by young actors. Lorenzo resumed taking part in repertoire performances of classical and contemporary texts; he dedicated himself to the alternative programme of the Teatro Quirino in Rome run by his father Geppy Gleijeses: He developed his working relationship with the Fanny and Alexander group from Ravenna and continued to be interested in the intersections between dance and theatre to satisfy his need for physical commitment derived from his training. Manolo, married to a young Cuban woman and with two children to support, began a collaboration with Antonio Rezza; he presented performances devised and realised by himself, and helped Lorenzo in the production and planning of projects whenever he was asked. But the idea of being a stable group was abandoned. We had thought of the name Prickly Pears in English, fantasising about future international engagements confronted with roots imbedded in the south. One of the occasions for a renewed encounter was a tour of Odin Teatret in Gallipoli, Puglia, in 2014. Lorenzo came to visit us to introduce Maria Alberta Navello, who would become the mother of his daughter, Valeria. He told us how difficult it was to have the time and space to devote to research, how much he missed the opportunity of devoting himself to an independent project. He was nostalgic of the times when he had the ambition of being an actor-author as Leo de Berardinis had been. During that talk on the waterfront next to the fishermen’s port, facing the September sun and with a newspaper in our hands, the first seed of the future performance An Ordinaryl Day of the Dancer Gregorio Samsa was thrown into the air. Eugenio and I offered Lorenzo a period of residence at Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium in Holstebro and a modest sum. After the copious and customary exchange of letters to match calendars and engagements, Lorenzo and Mirto Baliani came to our theatre in Denmark for two weeks in November 2015. Much had already happened. The twofold need to find funding by describing intent and the desire to make research had produced various titles, proposals and texts. A sequence of movements had been fixed during the work with Michele di Stefano, MK’s choreographer, and the idea of working on parallel developments with different dramaturgies was born from the exchange with Luigi de Angelis of Fanny and Alexander. Then there was Lorenzo’s and Mirto’s wish to work together. At the beginning the project was called 58th Parallel. Holstebro was at the North Parallel. A document of that period wries: “In the beginning, how does the body of a performer act and react to the solicitations of those who turn it into composition matter? What method does Eugenio Barba use and how can the methods he has achieved be transformed when Michele Di Stefano and Luigi De Angelis intervene in them according to their own poetics? And what remains, what is forgotten, lost or abandoned during the creative phase? How is a gesture, the act of sharing a word or sentence, a physical movement in relation to space, an instant of theatre constructed? And moreover: how do you prepare your body to extend towards the outside? And who are you (or who do you become) when you meet the other?” Many words to justify a more essential need: to engage in a stage research as an actor. In reality, during the process to create a performance – or even two at the same time as Lorenzo wanted – one must learn to collaborate with chance. In those weeks in Holstebro I had promised to follow Lorenzo’s and Mirto’s work, but I had to leave, and I asked Eugenio Barba to help me. I knew that Lorenzo and Mirto would have been very pleased to have Eugenio with them during rehearsals, but I also thought that Eugenio would appreciate being forced to enter the rehearsal space and leave aside the administrative commitments that plague us every day. Upon my return I saw a run-through of scenes. At the end, I tried to understand what guided Eugenio’s decision and determination in giving suggestions and indications, but I was perplexed. I had not seen anything that gave me associations to guide me for further comments and tasks, only movements that seemed to me hard and inorganic, mechanical and repetitive. I did not understand how the complicity between Eugenio, Lorenzo and Mirto had formed, and what the sequence of a dancer who returns home had to do with Frans Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Why did Lorenzo run towards a white wall? The sound accompaniment and the lights convinced me more, but even in that area I found it difficult to follow a logic that allowed me to make proposals. I had been absent and now I found myself outside without a door or window that would open a crack for me to become part of the process again. The next meeting took place at the Galleria Toledo in Naples in June 2016. Manolo was with us again, with Mirto and Lorenzo. I felt at home in this environment, less unsure of my role and how I could contribute. I put aside the desire to receive associations and to understand, and chose to think as an actress. I showed what I would do in the illuminated squares and rectangles, how I would play with the space and light, how I would create surprises and variations, what I could do with the hanging ropes that now delimited the space, guided only by the need to maintain the attention of the spectator and of Eugenio who observed from outside. I lent my body, so very different from Lorenzo’s. Eugenio was absorbed in storing images, focusing on the problems of the ‘here and now’. It was then that I heard him say for the first time: “I only need a week of work and we are finished”. I really hoped that Lorenzo, Mirto and Manolo wouldn’t believe him. They certainly worked a lot before we met again in June 2017, on the stage of the Teatro Quirino in Rome, without observers. It was there that the performance opened its doors to me. Finally, during the first rehearsal, I recognised the possibility of being moved by Lorenzo on stage accompanied by the precision of Mirto’s soundtrack. In those few days, hours and hours were dedicated to the first scenes in which hands and knees, face and torso had to appear and disappear in a dialogue with the strong light that came down from the ceiling. Lorenzo was tired. His gaze up into the light radiating from above seemed like a plea. Was it the actor’s desire that something should finally function or was it the prayer of a character that was beginning to emerge? I started to let myself be guided by associations. In those days we recorded the external voices and the big television appeared. I did not like it. It seemed too symbolic to me when it weighed on Lorenzo’s back, crushing him. The loneliness of a young man surrounded by technological means of all kinds, who becomes smaller and smaller, closing in on himself, could not be fulfilled by a television typical of another generation. It blocked my view and disturbed the lighting design. But the constraints and difficulties force us to find unexpected solutions. Eugenio seemed enthusiastic: “we have the final scene. We have understood the direction that the performance wants to take, one more week of work and we will conclude.” We left each other with the feeling of having made progress and Lorenzo thought he knew what he had to work on. I also hoped it was so. But the phase was approaching when the sketches of repeated ideas lost strength and conviction at each subsequent meeting. New tasks followed one another decisively, but in contradictory directions. It was necessary to create, fix, repeat one, one hundred, one thousand times, to then throw everything away and start again. The scenes that seemed to have no future occupied our attention. Just when the illusion of having achieved a result consoled us, the feeling that nothing worked arrived together with the desperation that time was running by. It is the difficult moment when one must sell the performance and decide the date of the premiere, creating an external obligation. It is the time when the directors must pass over to the spectators’ side and abandon the actors. Nothing can be forgiven any more. The rigour is at the highest level. Even Lorenzo, rehearsing alone, had worked as a director and lost his roots on stage. The external recorded voices should clarify the story, but they distanced the sense. The performance had become conceptual and the possibility of affecting emotionally had disappeared. What was in front of us was intelligent but had no pulse. It no longer worked. All this was happening in front of thirty actors and directors who took part in a “collective mind” gathered to follow the last rehearsals. Each of them had an opinion to assert, an idea with which to contribute. I moved back to the stage to accompany Lorenzo and help him remember the sequences, to relax his voice that came out strident and shrill from a body stretched towards the irksome desire to reach a final result and never have to start again from the beginning. Eugenio sent Manolo to buy the ‘puppy’, a small red robot vacuum cleaner, almost a toy. It was urgently necessary to regain confidence in the work, in the performance that decides what it needs despite the director’s visions and dramaturgical, acting and musical ambitions. One more week. This time Eugenio even gave in to making a bet: one week in Holstebro to work with the texts, another one in Naples to put everything together and make a run-through a day. I promise not to interrupt, Eugenio repeated every time the rehearsal began. But he never managed to. The first minutes of the performance were repeated infinite times. Will we ever reach the end? The obvious mistake that had initially indicated the direction to take now no longer had the right to exist. The title might be Perpetual Motion. It has been forgotten. Perhaps because the result started to appear: the point of arrival of an ordinary day of a dancer who speaks with his father, girlfriend, choreographer and psychologist in search of himself. Does he believe he is a cockroach or do the others see him as such? It does not matter. The six initial movements and the infinite possibilities of evocative variations discovered along the tortuous path of creation remain.