«Mobility is in all respects a fatal disease and it is completely natural that people treat those who are ill with mobility or on redundancy the same way as those with hepatitis or tuberculosis. Mobility is not contagious, but everyone behaves as if it were. […] In the illness of others, the awareness of our being healthy in misfortune is made explicit and nothing makes us appreciate life like going to a funeral. And now let’s begin, because my father has never missed a funeral, at least since he retired». This incipit, taken from the novel “A wonderful world” by Vitaliano Trevisan (Sandrigo, 1960 – Crespadoro, 2022), introduces the version of “Scandisk”, a dramaturgical work by the same author that the young director Jacopo Squizzato (Verona, 1990), is taking on a long national tour. After a debut at Teatro delle Moline in Bologna last year, the play will be on stage at Teatro delle Passioni in Modena until April 13, and then continue at Teatro Studio in Bolzano (April 16). The text is the first of the theatrical trilogy “Wordstar(s)”, composed between the end of the 90s and the beginning of the new millennium by the writer, screenwriter, actor, playwright and theatre director from Vicenza, one of the most interesting and independent voices in the contemporary Italian literary scene, still little known to the general public despite numerous awards and media appearances.
“Scandisk” di Vitaliano Trevisan, regia di Jacopo Squizzato, ph. Vladimir Bertozzi, courtesy ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro
The author, who died of a self-induced overdose of psychotropic drugs, began to devote himself to what he himself called «the disease of writing» on the threshold of his forties, after a long period characterized by a deliberate professional instability, in which he tried his hand at various jobs, such as clerk, furniture designer in franchising, worker and tinsmith. At the center of his artistic production, the obsession with the ethos of work prevailing in the surroundings of Vicenza where he was born and raised, a strip of Veneto between the 80s and 90s still economically depressed, but already affected by the radical economic and social transformations that have now exploded in terms of rapid enrichment and dehumanization of production. Based on his own direct experience, Trevisan portrays the Veneto province of small and medium-sized firms by telling true stories with a lucid and sharp definition of detail that delves into reality with a proud concreteness in receiving its most prosaic aspects. Through crude if not deliberately scurrilous language, the author in his prose brings to life completely immanent situations, where a fundamentalist adherence to the ordinariness of events and conversations becomes a literary or theatrical register that is disconcerting in its nakedness. The subtle gap between realism and stage fiction triggered by their imperfect coincidence causes the concentration to shift from the individuality of the individual characters – usually workers assigned to manual or laborious tasks – to the broader issues implied by their condition, such as the lack of safety regulations, frustration with conduct rules perceived as unmotivated coercion or class antagonism. Furthermore, from the biting nature of the jokes and the even more eloquent silences, an existential condition emerges, balanced between philosophical acceptance of the existing and hyperbolic madness, which for the author, as for his characters, is the soul of a provinciality raised to the level of a whole world.
“Scandisk” di Vitaliano Trevisan, regia di Jacopo Squizzato, ph. Vladimir Bertozzi, courtesy ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro
Unlike what the initial off-screen speech would suggest, the recording of a public reading by Trevisan preserved in the CGIL historical archive in Bologna, Squizzato’s show, on stage together with Mauro Bernardi and Beppe Casales, focuses on the restitution of the total sharing by the writer of his characters’ ontological horizon, in its contingency dangerously overlooking the mystery of the meaning of life that we all face. No one, for Trevisan, seems to be closer to that mystery than workers who sometimes, like himself when he installed gutters on the roofs of construction sites, find themselves almost unconsciously putting their lives in the hands of their colleagues, in circumstances where the risk of the job eliminates any possibility of idle mental digression. Even the title “Scandisk”, the name of the computer program that scans the computer’s hard disk to check for damaged files and clusters, highlights the close connection between the Vicenza-born playwright’s writing and his personal experience made universal by the dimension of memory, which constitutes – in Squizzato’s words – «a hard disk of the diffused periphery». Thus, the impassable habitat of the working class (in this case embodied by three warehouse workers in a ball bearing factory) is recreated by the scenography, a sort of concrete bunker. This leaden artificial sky, while towering over and containing the actors, at the same time opens onto the unknowable infinity of a natural oasis, ideally placed in the dark stalls where the audience sits. From there comes the chirping of migratory birds that are allowed to travel from one hemisphere of the planet to the other and there the imaginary objects that the protagonists occasionally throw across the stage, lighting up luminous trajectories, are swallowed up.
“Scandisk” di Vitaliano Trevisan, regia di Jacopo Squizzato, ph. Vladimir Bertozzi, courtesy ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro
The stage action is reduced to the bare minimum: punctuated by the factory sirens, it is composed of fragmentary sequences where the actors, moving piles of pallets or taking a break between shifts, mock each other, at times expressing melancholy for the desolation of a landscape now subservient to human productivity or anger for the alienation induced by the growing standardization of work. The faint narrative trace is the absurd concoction by the three of a robbery that would allow them to be free to migrate to the warmth like the birds of the oasis bordering the warehouse, a pretext to probe with livid comedy an everyday life difficult to verbalize in its most authentic folds through the expressions, tics, desires and reasoning of the characters. The performers are very good at dosing a comedy that, although lexically vulgar and stuffed with clichés, never borders on caricature and is an effective tool to immerse the spectators in the heart of a contradictory class soul (perhaps today a little obsolete for cultural debate, a convenient choice from a political point of view, according to a statement by Trevisan in one of his last interviews [1]) in which impulses towards the absolute and shameless pettiness coexist. A similar dualism can be found in Trevisan’s poetics, whose double identity as a writer-worker is a constant presence under the surface, recalled in the sound score of the show by the alternation, in some moments without dialogue, of the amplified clicking of keys typed on the keyboard and noises from an industrial plant.
Info:
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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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