At the intersection of memory, nostalgia, and new poetic horizons lies the latest creation by Eugenio Barba (Brindisi, 1936), “Hamlet’s Clouds,” on stage at the Teatro Arena del Sole in Bologna before its imminent arrival at the Venice Theatre Biennale. The reflection on Shakespeare’s text by the legendary founder of the Odin Teatret, theorist of the revolutionary dramaturgy defined as “Third Theatre” whose canons continue to inspire multiple theatrical experiences, is not configured as a simple reinterpretation or revisitation, but as a poetic transfiguration rooted in the creative humus of a company that has made wandering and transformation its expressive grammar. The choice of the subtitle “Dedicated to Hamnet and young people without a future” is not casual, as it harbors the germinative process of the dramaturgical operation at the origin of the show. The character of Hamnet, Shakespeare’s son who died at eleven years old and who hovers throughout the piece doubling the protagonist, is indeed used as a conceptual device aimed at questioning the legacy transmitted between generations, the incorporeal substance of what remains after disappearance, the dialectical relationship between fathers and sons in a world that seems to have lost the coordinates of the future.
“Le nuvole di Amleto”, regia di Eugenio Barba, ph. Stefano di Buduo, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
The scenic space of the Odin Teatret materializes as a liminal territory, a perceptual threshold between possible worlds, an emotional cartography in which objects, bodies and words acquire a symbolic value that transcends their immediate meaning. The audience is invited to sit (by Barba himself), instead of on the canonical rows of seats facing a raised stage, along the two sides of a sort of rectangular ring, delimited at the other two ends by golden curtains, which during the show are at times amplified or nullified by chromatic or graphic projections. The suggested spatial configuration, therefore, is never static but immerses the spectator in a mutable semantic landscape, where light – orchestrated by Stefano Di Buduo – creates zones of presence and absence, with chiaroscuro effects that evoke the transience of existence and the seductive power of shadows. In this symbolic universe, the scenic presence of the performers manifests in a diffused and controlled corporeality in every detail, the fruit of decades of research on pre-expressivity and theatrical anthropology. The actors – Antonia Cioaza, Else Marie Laukvik (co-founder of Odin in 1964), Jakob Nielsen, Rina Skeel, Ulrik Skeel, and Julia Varley – move according to a virtuosic corporeal code that hybridizes different traditions while maintaining that tension between antagonistic forces (between evanescence and concreteness, between vocal breath and corporeal consistency) which is the basis of the scenic bios developed by Barba. The temporal stratification that characterizes the show (Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable names in England in Shakespearean era registers) is further increased in the coexistence of veteran actors – custodians of a memory incorporated in more than half a century of research – and new presences. This generational coexistence represents not only a casting choice but becomes a vehicle for transmitting artisanal knowledge, of that work ethic that on stage has its tutelary deities in the archetypal presences of Eugenio Barba and Else Marie Laukvik.
“Le nuvole di Amleto”, regia di Eugenio Barba, ph. Stefano di Buduo, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
The poetics developed by the director is an expression of a theatre nourished by cultural contaminations and diverse expressive techniques, which operates in geographical, social and artistic peripheries, converging anthropology, poetry, and scenic craftsmanship. The dramaturgy proceeds by accumulation of signs, by montages of fragments, according to an associative logic that privileges rhizomatic connections over narrative linearity. In this mosaic of heterogeneous materials, even Shakespearean iconography is deconstructed and recomposed according to deviant trajectories that lead towards broader territories, where the story of the Danish prince is embodied in a plural and restless acting body, a catalyst for existential questions exceeding the original context. The spectator is from the beginning immersed in a phantasmatic dimension and in a dilated temporality, where dramatic progression gives way to an active contemplation of signs. The gaze is urged to linger in the interstices, on apparently marginal details, on that conceptual porosity that is generated between one gesture and another, between a word, a guttural verse, a dance step and the silence that reverberates them.
“Le nuvole di Amleto”, regia di Eugenio Barba, ph. Stefano di Buduo, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
In the Odin Teatret, every scenic element is subjected to continuous re-elaboration, stratification and refinement, and the actors are one with their costumes and with the fluidity of the scenography: the scenic objects are never mere accessories but true actants, bearers of symbologies that are activated in contact with the actor’s body. This semantic tension generates a field of forces in temporal short circuit where Shakespearean heritage and contemporaneity establish a fertile dialogue, through which questions about identity, revenge, love and death – central to Hamlet – are reformulated in light of present criticalities. The sound dramaturgy, which in passages between various scenic frames takes over, disrupting the relationships between actors, dissolves each time the density of voices and bodies, which in each scene links without qualitative jumps the lyrical register, the animalistic one and even a surreal version of classical acting. The directorial choices highlight this tension between form and content, resolving it every time with a new funambulistic balance between compositional rigor and expressive risk, between tradition and experimentation.
“Le nuvole di Amleto”, regia di Eugenio Barba, ph. Stefano di Buduo, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
The biological and psychic amalgam that characterizes the scenic presence of Odin’s actors manifests that visual grammar made of precision and abandonment, of control and risk, which distinguishes the versatility of the actors’ bodies, capable of becoming granitic as well as walking barely touching the ground at the limit of levitation. The actor’s body offers itself in every gesture as a well-trained instrument of creative resistance against homologation, against the banalization of the theatrical experience, testifying to the possibility of a theatre that still questions its roots and its meaning in an era of ephemeral cultural consumption. In its deepest essence, “Hamlet’s Clouds” is not just a theatrical work, but an interrogation on the persistence and transience of artistic experience, on the possibility of transmitting embodied knowledge through temporary and transcultural communities. Between philosophical reflection and artistic practice, Barba’s show invites us to rethink our relationship with cultural heritage, with collective memory and with future uncertainties in a perspective suspended between tradition and utopia. The territory he explores is a borderland between visible and invisible, between matter and chimera, between memory and absence, where a stubborn attempt to give body to the incorporeal transforms the theatrical act into a succession of visual epiphanies.
Info:
“Hamlet’s Clouds” is on stage at Arena del Sole in Bologna from May 14 to 18, in the Leo de Berardinis Hall, with the following schedule: Wednesday at 7:00 pm, Thursday and Friday at 8:30 pm, Saturday at 7:00 pm, Sunday at 4:00 pm. The show, produced by Tieffe Teatro, Odin Teatret and Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT / National Theatre, has a duration of 70 minutes.
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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