LE BLATTE
COCKROACHES
Acts of contemporary metamorphosis

At the end of the human drift, we find ourselves into a forced removal of memory, of all that has been, all that has gone before us...

After the horror, is it really better to start again? But from where? How, and with whom?

 

We are only at the beginning of a new era, but already we feel overwhelmed by an asphyxiated atmosphere and in every aspect - human, social, environmental, ... - we feel we have reached a point of no return.

 

We feel naked in the face of the present and the next future, and we do not know which is the right dress to wear, the one best suited to attend the grand finale, the party that will precede the extinction. Even though we are only at the beginning of the century, we already sense that decadence that always marks the end of an era as we melancholy abandon ourselves to the notes of An der schönen blauen Donau.

 

One hundred years after the death of Franz Kafka, the father of The Metamorphosis, its protagonist Gregor Samsa survives him, adapts and proliferates, giving birth to a community of blattoids that populate the ruins of an "ancient world": our own world.

 

Inspired by, among others, the Hungarian writer's masterpiece, THE BLATTS is a contemporary physical fable, surreal and social, harsh and disenchanted, that attempts to describe reality in its moving and wonderfully raw desolation.

As a humanist parable, told with unreal lightness, this new Creation tries to turn the banality of the everyday into a sort of poetry, in which its anti-hero protagonists remain suspended between the prison of reality and a dream of escape. Lost souls who try to water down melancholy and anxieties in the continuous, incessant act of doing, talking, dancing, humming, whistling... An unremarkable, wacky and authentic humanity, constantly capable of falling down and getting back up, and who hungrily wanders around in search of relationships with others.

A surreal and tragicomic act in which the viewer, alas, can recognize himself in the frailties of everyday life, an apocryphal Gospel chant about involuntary sinners waiting for a personal Apocalypse, a "...and they all lived happily ever after" that will never come.

 

This teeming microcosm gives life to different stage pictures made of the bodies and voices of five performers, in a trans-disciplinary mixture of necessary and superstructure-free languages. A use of bodies and movement that supports the stage hyper-narrative and that has distinguished C&C Company's poetic research since its inception.

 

LE BLATTE is based on a dramaturgical construction designed by sequential chapters, which are currently identified in the subtitles: So far so good, Anthropo-dinner, Tragedy, Non-differentiable residue, Will Beauty save the world?, Still Life, All's Well That Ends.

 

The set design is sparse, minimal: a concrete monolith, perhaps an old wall, enriched by the use of video-mapping projections representing hordes of migrating cockroaches in search of survival, and brought alive by the constant interaction with the performers who struggle and fumble not to succumb to each other.

 

Dreamy and subterraneously political, LE BLATTE  is a not so dystopian metaphor created with the intention of combining social realism with tragicomic writing. Seriously ironic, opposing pietism and pathetism, the compositional poetics employs the language of defeat to speak of hope, of decadence in anticipation of rebirth. This fall that precedes (perhaps) the longed-for ascent invites the viewer to reflect on the present (and perhaps the near future) through a black, biting humor.

 

This new Creation is part of the three-year research path on "Metamorphoses" already started last year by C&C and marks an important step toward the establishment of the Company's identity compositional style.