Metamorfosi

Metamorfosi is a piece of theatre-music for actress, live electronics, live video created as a unique event for the presentation of the National Audiovisual Museum in its location at the Palazzo della civiltà italiana in Rome EUR. The stagecraft interventions are made up of immaterial elements – light, projection, sound: nothing is added to the structure of the place.

Metamorphosis is part of a path of technological spectacle that already in the sixteenth century found its first presentations thanks to those who were able to create with optical and acoustic instruments shapes and representations of real and imaginary worlds. From the camera obscura, through the magic lantern to the cinema, there is now a further development that expands the mechanical visual magic into the digital world of the 21st century. Here, however, video is used exclusively in the video projection created live to define in this way a very particular “live cinema” that looks at – and stands as a modern-day development of – pre-cinema.
The same digital technology also allows the creation of “acoustic environments”. Soundscapes that surround the audience with voices and sounds in continuous movement, placing the spectator at the center of a listening world where reality and fiction are deeply intertwined. It is a work on space – thanks to the use of visual perception – and on time through the dramaturgical use of sound. At the same time and inevitably on memory and history.

Background: Athanasius Kircher

Among the reference figures of the past, so that contemporary creation through digital technologies is not simply an exercise in style, a character such as the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) appears in the project. Kircher arrived by chance in Rome in 1633, welcomed with all honors. He was appointed director of the Roman College and creator of the museum that would take his name. Kircher was celebrated with a great exhibition in Rome in 2001 in a game of precious coincidences. Kircher’s work is, by far, the most striking aspect of seventeenth-century scientific culture, historically more fertile than the Galilean and Newtonian academies precisely because it takes place in an excess of wonder that believes in the miracle because it intuits its amplified mechanism and does not believe in science so much as to make it a religion, as opposed to the believing philosophers who make science a religion (Brusatin, L’arte della meraviglia).
Kircher’s optical machines had to play an apologetic role, as well as a theatrical one, with the general public. And it is in this spirit that Kircher had to produce in front of crowds of amazed, but also amused, believers, incredibil shows as when, with a cylindrical mirror, he projects in the air the image of Jesus ascending to heaven, or using a concave mirror, a hyperbolic lens and the light of a candle, he projects on a wall the image of the devil (M.G. Ianniello, Kircher e l’Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae).
The use of video technology plays with the technology of the seventeenth-century ‘camera obscura’. From the diary of a cartographer of the time: “I’ll bring you pleasant news in my house; not differently in a dark room the action of the sun through a glass makes you see everything that happens outside (although overturned)”. And again: “I have in my house Drebbel’s other instrument, which produces wonderful effects of reflected images in a dark room. It is not possible for me to describe its beauty in words: all painting is dead in comparison, because here is life itself, or something even more mobile, if only words were not lacking. The figure, the contour and the movements blend naturally, in an absolutely pleasant way” And so the darkroom is, in Metamorphosis, “recreated” through the use of digital technologies. A bridge between the 17th century and our days. And “Descriptio” is one of the most used terms to designate the cartographic activity: cartographers and their editors were in fact called “descriptors of the world”.

Sounds

Sound plays a very important role in the project. The sounds explore and bring out the acoustic space of the building inhabited by the many voices. Sounds made up in part by electronics with extremely low “anomalous” frequencies – bordering on the subliminal – and supracute (ultrasound). Sounds distributed thanks to a multi-channel acoustic environment in the hall – the sounds move so incessantly around the audience – controlled by computer. Together with the electronics, part of the sounds used come from the archives of the State Records Library. Rare recordings of voices have been selected and sampled in order to contribute to the realization of the acoustic environment of the project. The audience is thus immersed in the sounds, in a forest that is the invisible image of the palace. An image made not only of space but also of time. A beating heart of images, sounds and words where, between modernity and archaism, the single voice becomes a chorus and moves in space.

The show and the technological device

In Metamorfosi, Anna Bonaiuto’s voice moves through a forest of other voices (partly coming from a research work inside the archives of the Discoteca di Stato). Voices of unknown people, images of “secondary” places, micro-events, historical documents where famous voices do not appear. A work on the details that is brought back to life and dramaturgically elaborated by exploiting, in particular, the building that will contain the future museum and the technological infrastructure (especially related to sound, light and networks) that will be the backbone of the museum’s activities.
Anna Bonaiuto’s movements are captured by cameras that, through the use of interactive software, developed by the author at the STEIM Foundation (Amsterdam), allow the real-time processing of the image that is reprojected on a large format – internally and externally on the facade of the building – creating a ‘live video art’, usable by the public.
The scenic space becomes one with the performer, and the performer herself with her digital and acoustic images and shadows that alternate between pre-recorded material and footage shot in real time within the performance. Digital and analog metamorphoses. The face is reprojected on a large format, gradually transforming into other faces, animals, places, landscapes thanks to digital technologies, through an elaborate computer graphic created live.
The architecture of the entire building is used in the show with materials shot in pre-production and thus making Anna Bonaiuto act in several places at once. In this way, the audience has the opportunity to visit with their eyes the secret places of this building. The micro-actions, the gestures, the hands, are visible to the public inside and outside the building transforming the building into a unique place of material and immaterial performance and creating a performance of great impact and suggestion. The Palace of Italian Civilization at EUR is a transcendental and metaphysical absolute place.
For the first time this space is open to everyone launching the possibility of creating an identity. The place that contains the voices and faces of so many people, each of them (in his being unknown) important and decisive for the development of the show. And where the writing that appears on the facade is emphasized – almost as a guiding word – just ‘transmigrators’. The entire ground floor of the building and its exterior resounds through an elaborate acoustic and visual environment (with large-format video projections) controlled via computer by a sophisticated direction that manages sounds and images live. The direction is also part of the show so it is visible to the public and also part of the dramaturgy of the event. The set design is therefore totally digital to transform the scene into a single machine reactive to the various dramaturgical situations developed.

Camera obscura

As documentation of the Metamorfosi project, was made Camera Obscura, a film (color, beta, 30′) that will be aired on RaiSat Art in May 2001. The film works essentially on live footage taken during the show to restore part of Metamorfosi‘s sensoriality. Camera Obscura is produced by Giardini Pensili in association with the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Eur Spa.

Metamorfosi, 2001, Palazzo della Civiltà italiana EUR, Roma

Metamorfosi, 2001, Palazzo della Civiltà italiana EUR, Roma

Metamorfosi, 2001, Palazzo della Civiltà italiana EUR, Roma

Metamorfosi, 2001, Palazzo della Civiltà italiana EUR, Roma

Metamorfosi, 2001, Palazzo della Civiltà italiana EUR, Roma

Credits

Metamorfosi
a play by
Roberto Paci Dalò

With
Anna Bonaiuto

Texts from
Euripides
Gabriel Frasca

Lights design 
Nevio Cavina

Live video and programming
Cristiano Chesi
Denis Roio
Floriano Secciani

Interactive systems 
STEIM (Amsterdam)
dyne.org (Vienna)

Live electronics
Roberto Paci Dalò

Photo director 
Marco Tani

Editing 
Natalie Cristiani

Assistant director
Floriano Secciani

Technical management &
outdoor lights design

Arnaldo Ciavatta

Service
Alter Echo (Rimini)

Stage photographs 
Max Botticelli

Production 
Giardini Pensili 2001

In collaboration with 
Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali
EUR spa

Direction, music, space, video
Roberto Paci Dalò

Rome, Palazzo della civiltà italiana EUR
february 16th 2001
live on live broadcasting Radiotre Suite