Italian company Citta di Ebla are making their UK debut with The Dead, an adaptation of the James Joyce story opening as part of the London International Mime Festival in January. The company, founded in 2004 by Claudio Angelini and Valentina Bravetti near Ravenna in Italy, have become widely known for their distinct visual language and interdisciplinary approach to performance making. As curators of an annual festival of independent performance, Ipercorpo, the company’s work is very much positioned in the landscape of independent practice in Italy, defining an approach that centres on processes of stage adaptation, capitalising on the body and the image, seeing the stage as a space of otherness.

In their work, Citta have engaged with philosophy, canonical texts and images as starting points for performance, navigating the work both through improvisation and an engagement with context. They place emphasis on the sensorial and treat the stage both as space and canvas. For their adaptation of Joyce, Citta consider not just the implications of the narrative itself, but also the poetics of nostalgia through an exploration of time. We spoke to co-founder Claudio Angelini about their method, processes and the ideas at the heart of their work, in the wider context of Italian independent theatre.

Run Riot: The Dead is your UK debut, an adaptation of the short story with the same name published in James Joyce’s Dubliners. What compelled you to engage with this story? What was at the core of your dramaturgical process?

Claudio Angelini: The work was born from a desire to continue an investigation of the literary form of the twentieth century story. In 2010, I started with Kafka's Metamorphosis and decided to continue with another European writer in choosing another seminal piece from the same period. The main theme of The Dead is nostalgia. Is it possible to speak of a nostalgia of the present? The present, as a fleeting moment, immediately consigned to the past. The present as an instant which has been lived just now, or as an instant which a restless, re-emerging past spills into. A sudden memory, a sound, a smell which cause events of the past to erupt into our present. There is no better means to express this than photography. Therefore, our show transforms into a story in photographic images. It's not a slide show, as the photos are taken live, consigning them to the past, immediately, but with great impetus because they overlap with the performer's action, thus creating and physical relationship with nostalgia.

Run Riot: Your adaptation engages and juxtaposes documentation and live performance, featuring real-time projected images taken live by a photographer. Given that this is an adaptation of a short story, that you are already working with raw text, how do body and image engage with each other here? What is the role of this device, how does it relate to a narrative and what has your process been for this project?

Claudio Angelini: Joyce's pen is blessed with excellent visual qualities, but that's not all, his writing flows through time to create a multisensory universe. Sounds also act and are modified in the narrative space. From a certain point of view, a free interpretation of the story, which in our case becomes a "mise en scène" is not didactic (this would be a failure), almost becomes a necessity. We maintain the "heart" of the story: the sudden memory of a dead person, a memory which pervades our protagonist's body and therefore the entire perceptive space. In order to enter into Joyce's mechanisms, we scrupulously worked on the story's fundamental moment, the anagnorosis if you must, the moment in which Gabriel (the husband) observes Greta (the wife and protagonist) on the stairs in the aunt's house, the visual, auditory and psychological sensations became our manual for crossing over - and our guide. There's not enough room for me here to fully explain but in this step, Joyce demonstrates his ability to construct images and sensations through writing, with minimal phase displacements which in the end oblige us to ask a question: how much time has passed? We could also answer: a lifetime. Or, perhaps a few minutes. I feel it is important to say that sound is also partly drawn live from the scene, mixed with the deferred sound of another time. Exactly as in the image.

Run Riot: Ebla was an ancient city located close to Aleppo- rooted in Syrian civilisation, most famous for its thousands of cuneiform tables that recorded its language in Sumerian script. Can you tell us about why this was an important reference point for you as a company?  

Claudio Angelini: Ebla was discovered by an Italian, it was destroyed on several occasions, but the site hadn't been identified for centuries, it is associated with the fragility of human occurrences and disappearance. It was discovered through excavation, an artisan and ancient system. Paradoxically, the fact that it was burnt to the ground ensured the preservation of the precious cuneiform characters carved into terracotta. A gesture of destruction favored the utmost conservation. A failure to appreciate, disappearance, destruction for creation. Burn profusely to create profusely. All of this is theatre for us.

Run Riot: In your past work you’ve engaged with canonical texts, like Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Shakespeare’s Othello or Sophocles’ Oedipus. Some of your work begins with the premise of the impossibility of adaptation, building on the performative potential of the body , visual language and scenography to construct meaning onstage. Can you tell us a bit about your approach to making work, and what informs this practice?

Claudio Angelini: Theatre is the space of elsewhere par excellence. It's the place where you pretend for real. It's the demolition of reality with reality as your only tool for doing so. It's field is space and vision, together with sound. If you choose to deal with narratives or dramaturgical constructions like those you mention in your question, it is not possible to fall back onto narration or fable. Any attempt at recreating on stage what writers have told in their writing results in you being exhausted by the likes of Kafka or Joyce. In my opinion this is also the case with Shakespeare, even though, unlike the other two, he wrote specifically for representation. So the question is: is there an extractor capable of projecting this narrative dimension onto the scene? The start of stage rehearsals consists of identifying such an extractor. In the case of our Joyce, it is the choice of Gretta as the scene's absolute protagonist, identifying the photographer (invisible) and getting him to play the part of the dead person (Michael Fury), thus giving the photographer a gaze, looking at reality also in the visual detail through the eye of someone we do not see. And the husband (Gabriel), what of him? Is he the one who observes at length the transformation of his wife in respect to the memory? For us he is the audience. The question which the spectator should ask during the show is: who is looking now? Through whom are we looking? This viewpoint changes throughout the performance and as such places the audience in the centre of narrative development.

Run Riot: Your work is concerned with processes of image-making and constructions of meaning onstage, and you bring a range of disciplines and theatrical strategies in every process, but also a particular politics. How has your work developed across the different projects, from a conceptual parable in five movements through to your current project that links action, image and document?

Claudio Angelini: There is no project detailed enough to constitute a pre-constructed path. During the last three years we have focused on short bourgeois stories, private events but with the explosive force of a war. If you work in theatre, you must be aware that you are dealing with a highly complex art form. The stage, which appears as a limit, in reality is a formidable possibility for experimentation. Each project somehow calls onto itself its own form, technology, body and sound. The process is intuitive. Pre-constructed ideas must pass the test on the stage, and the stage is never wrong, often preliminary ideas are completely overhauled. It is much more interesting to see what the scene has to offer in its development: so finding a way for the stage to surprise oneself, almost an oper-artive way. Place things so that they are in a condition to explode new elements. When this happens, then I feel that I have done my job well. The starting point can be absolutely anything. A story, a philosophical text, a painting, a photograph, a mechanical manual. In the case of our last work, Pharmakos, our starting point was a text by a philosopher called Giorgio Agamben, the title of the text was Homo Sacer. The starting point can change every time, but this has nothing to do with freedom of expression. On the contrary, it is a prison within which it is necessary to redraw the map in order to move ourselves and definitively, the audience.

Run Riot: You were founded in 2004 as a company, and also organise the annual festival for independent Italian companies, Ipercorpo. What is the landscape of independent theatre in Italy, and where do you see your work positioned? Considering that your work is presented in London as part of the London International Mime Festival, do you feel this is a productive context for your work, and do you consider yourself as operating within that territory?

Claudio Angelini: The independent theatre scene in Italy is rich in talent and varied. This country is on its knees as far as cultural support is concerned. It is embarrassing to note the percentage of GDP Italy invests in culture, furthermore live art is the most penalised as it fails to produce lasting assets and as such has no place on a market which focuses on investment over time, as is the case with a painting or a sculpture. In spite of all this, there are pockets of resistance everywhere which are kept alive by their very condition. This is a problem, in my opinion, not so much for the artist, who must be capable of working under any conditions, or rather render the conditions an element of the story itself, but for the public. To deprive contemporary and performance art of funding precludes a new public from being attracted and getting closer to these practices. This perpetuates the obscurity of many artists, not because they are not worthy of fame, but because of difficulties in finding spaces, places and situations congenial to the display of our work. We are constructing a future with a visual and sound horizon exclusively constituted by the shopping centre. At this rate, not only will it be difficult to renew the public but it will also become less important in the eyes of future generations, even in the Coliseum in Rome (to name but one example). Perhaps we are yet to understand the seriousness of the decrease in investment in culture. Allow me to say that it is as tied in with the health of a population as medical science.

The London International Mime Festival is one of the points of excellence on the European performing arts scene, which takes place in an important European city. We are immensely satisfied to be here and consider it to be a reward for our work on Joyce.

London International Mime Festival
8 Jan - 1 Feb 2014
at various venues: Barbican, Jacksons Lane, Leicester Square Theatre, Platform Theatre, Royal Opera House, Southbank Centre.
mimelondon.com

Città Di Ebla: 'The Dead'
UK Premiere
at The Pit, Barbican
Tue 28 Jan - Sat 1 Feb
7.45pm
After-show discussion: Wed 29 Jan
Book tickets online barbican.org.uk

Città Di Ebla
cittadiebla.com