From 12th to 13th September | 21.00
SECRET LOCATION | 2h
performance
Alex Cecchetti
Tamam Shud
within the frame of TransArte
national premiere
Directed by Alex Cecchetti
Performers Alex Cecchetti, Contralto Francesca Lisetto, Controtenore Adonà Momo
Music from Allegri, Landini, Purcelli, Gershwin
A man was found dead, his identity unknown. Nothing can be used for identification. The clothing labels, fingerprints, the number of shoes have been carefully unstitched, deleted, washed, bleached, and consigned to oblivion. His only link with the world is a small piece of paper hidden in a secret pocket sewn into pants. On that fragile support the last words of a Persian poem: Tamam Shud. This is the end.
That corpse suddenly rises, and wanders in the place where it was found trying to remember the causes of his death, reconstructing his memories, regain its lost identity. Himself will say that “Nothing is more obscene today of a man from whom you can not get information.”
The show is inspired by the true story of Somerton Beach Mystery. In 1948, against the backdrop of the Cold War and of international espionage, a corpse was found on a beach in the south of ‘Australia. To date remains unknown causes that led to the death of the victim’s identity. A murder that remains unsolved, and that has led repeatedly to investigators on the trail of the book of poems by Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat.
A sort of sublime carpe diem between alcohol, women and clay that according to many scholars hides a spiritual secret message. After the discovery, in a secret pocket sewn inside the pants, investigators recovered a piece of paper torn from the pages of a book, the writing on the sheet Tamam Shud, the last two words with which finishes the Rubaiyat.
Without being a reconstruction of the event from which it takes inspiration, Tamam Shud Alex Cecchetti try to reconstruct the biography of a whole generation, a generation born under the promises of various utopias and social renewal which is now hostage and exploited by marketers and by ‘information. In an era where every biography is a rich mine of information that is made available to the market, die without a trace is perhaps the act of higher strength.
In ancient Egyptian funerary scrolls is said, to remember his life in the kingdom of the dead, you need a specific spell. One who knows this spell is cursed to wander forever between life and death, without knowing who he was in life and lost between the banks of the underground river of the dead. How does it feel to wake up in the unknown realm of without memory with just a poetry book to guide us?
BIOGRAPHY
Alex Cecchetti was born in Terni, Italy, in 1977 and now he lives between Paris and London.
He is an artist, poet, choreographer, has developed a unique practice, difficult to classify, that could be called art of avoidance: tactical and poetic, aesthetic and materialistic, its system leads to produce specific situations or objects that can exist both inside and outside the traditional exhibitions. It is in this double movement of representation and conceal that it’s possible to inscribe his staging of invisible choreographies of hidden nudes and sleeping dancers.
His work is focused on the construction of specific narratives that are experienced both mentally and physically by the audience. Two works can describe better the world in which Cecchetti plunge his audience.
Louvre is the tour guide of the Louvre without the Louvre. The whole collection of the museum is summoned from the domain of the invisible through techniques of rhetoric, story-telling and dance. In Walking Backwards the spectator is accompanied literally to walk backward inside a story and to become the core of the vision. One who walks backwards does not know the nature of the images to come. The world does not come to sight smoothly, but it suddenly appears from nowhere. In the new paradigm in which the viewer plunge his life the future is on the back and the past in the front. Unknowns are the images that appear and intimate and full of meaning those that leave from us that remain still visible in the horizon. Devised and orchestrated by Alex Cecchetti, Voices of Urgency is a 4 days panels of poetry and science hosted by Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris, produced by FIAC and programmed during the international fair of contemporary art in Paris.
