Interferences Addiction

I totally lost the time dimension, I barely know what day is today, it is like an odd and funny feeling of being high, stoned by art...I can tell, I am enthusiastically tired, I never been so happy of being busy.

Last night after the show I thought “ I need some rest, it is better for me to go home”, and suddenly a thought crossed my mind; the international young critics would have lived the next day. Without even thinking I was at the door of the TIFF House. The place was packed, I could barely move, the music was just brilliant, the StereoTrombone were on stage, and by the way people were jumping you could tell they loved the music.

What this festival has been able to create is a real international breath. Thank to the Interferences I have been able to meet people from all over the world, people with whom I share the same enthusiasm for theatre, that gives to all of us a good chance for new collaboration and more important we had the possibility to have great discussion and to learn new. I believe that, wherever some of the performances were not on a high standard, one of the aim was to link people and not just to sit, watch and write. To appreciate good you need bad, that is a stupid sentence that I keep repeating to myself, it helps me sometimes.

The performance Kafka Project, directed by Karina Holla, has a very interesting start, the director plays with  dark dynamism, on the stage for the first 15 minutes the actors play a kind of chaotic synchronized gear. The first part of the show is fascinating and inspiring, but, unfortunately, it loses its initial power when the actors start to act. One very negative consideration goes to the use of the microphone, I do not know if it was decided at the very last moment because of acoustic issue, or if the mike was meant to be there since the beginning; in my opinion the use of a television microphone, in italian we call it “ Il cono”, distracts the audience and impoverishes the performance. Unfortunately I have to say that if Kafka Project ended after the first twenty minutes, I would have had a different idea about it, and I would probably have liked it.

At 9.00 pm on the Studio is completely dark. I hear some movement on the stage, and my attention is taken by the lights of the red led monitors that like a red wave move, one after the other, towards the stage. First flash, second, third... Who Shuts the Night opens the thick black curtain with a contrast between dark and light, the same contrast is carries for all the play; deviation, frustration, fear, the absurdity that become reality.

Everything happens in a room, to symbolize the state of confinement, the love between a former nazi officer and a woman, a jew who met him in a concentration camp. A love that could sound illogical, but it is not, no one else can understand their feeling like they do, lost in the same stream of hurting memories and damnation. Executor... Victim... Victim... Executor, in a continuous rhythmic switch of roles the two characters show the incapacity of being free from their ghosts. Both of them live in a state of unconscious self-punishment. The metaphor for this claustrophobic and mentally sick love passes through the size of the room, that at one point is delimitated just by the bed size, a way probably to suggest that their own sadness has killed them. It is 10.00 pm or later, at this point I am outside the Theatre telling my self to go to sleep, but Interferences has given me addiction and my day ended this morning at 4.00 o'clock, with a big smile printed on my face.