Report

Feb 24, 2009, 2.30 pm

-Reading of Macbeth’s Scenes v-vi-vii, Act I. Sylvia Toone working on the source play in order to help the students in adapting Shakespeare’s play more confidently, with a greater attention to the 3 selected scenes of Act 1.

- Act 1, three witches, TV news-Acting out Pasquale AND Giusy’s production for Act 1 (potentially the very beginning of the performance on stage –to be enlarged
- Casting new witches: Renata, Nunzia Scala, Eleonora Cipriano [to change again]
- Act 1—TV set as a protagonist, close up on the theatre screen, when it raises, a regular size TV set goes on looping the same news-casting , but now it’s background. TV as a medium of desire: power, fashion, celebrity, success: THE GOLDEN ROUND
- Song by Lucariello (proposed by Raffaele) could be played during Duncan’s murder
- THINGS TO BE DONE: 1)video-recording of the TV news scene (Raffaele); 2) choosing the song (Simona); 3) correcting the letter text.


Feb 25, 2009
8.30 am
CAMPUS THEATRE

-ACT 1, TV news—2 people: an interviewer (the journalist) and an interviewed, urban scenario
- 9.30 Davimus 1 on stage
-10.30 Davimus 1 performing their work on xenophobia
-11.30 Davimus 2 filming the news scene.
-We’ve rewritten and video-recorded the TV-news scene (Sylvia Toone as the anchor woman, Bill Papaleo as the interviewer)
- Act 2—we’ve worked on the script for the couple’s meeting. Three moments have been distinguished:
1. Lady Macbeth’s excitement after reading the letter.
2. The phone rings and Lady Macbeth is informed about Duncan’s coming for dinner.
3. Lady Macbeth and Macbeth meet up.
-Use of images TV looping from Joe Macbeth (Macbeth as a boss, Lady Macbeth/Lady Macduff relationship, the doll)
-Sleepwalking scene-playing a song like a ‘ninna nanna’-lullaby (it sounds like a filastrocca:The Thane of Fife had a wife). Giusy suggested to use a Neapolitan song about a brother who kills his brother to get their father’s power, richness.
- A mirror and a corner bar in Lady Macbeth’s sitting room. Lady Macbeth looks at her specular image while she says ‘I could be the Queen. Finally a’boss’The phone rings--disruption

Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance

Lingua inglese 2 davimus

First meeting spring semester

There were several students, 15 may be waiting for Roberto Paci Dalò. Some overlappings with degree sessions. In any case our lesson has been moved to Tuesday 2.30 4.30 pm in room 6.

-two extra meetings will be
1.
on Tuesday Feb 22, and wed 23 with Sylvia Toone and Stuart Marlow
2.
On March 10 with Roberto Paci Dalò

They will help us working on Macbeth O’Boss which will be put on stage the last week of April and should last about 20 minutes

Starting from the division of roles Giusy and Pasquale-scriptwriters and quasidirectors-started working on the setting and dialogue for the first act and they come up with [they will send their summary]
- having a TV screen where two journalists announce the camorra fight where Macbeth and Banquo ‘won’ over opposite clans. Video where one of the journalists will be Alessandro Licata (dialogue to be created and shot)
- in between the two halves of the Curtain a singer sings a Neapolitan song—pub/cabaret kind (which one?—Simona Palmieri is going to sing
- The curtain rises and we have tables with people drinking and especially SMOKING and at one of the tables the three witches /bad girls meet Macbeth and Banquo coming back, tired and wounded from the camorra attack.
EVERYBODY:
FAIR IS FOUL AND FOUL IS FAIR
HOVER THROUGH THE Fog/smoke and FILTHY AIR

THE THREE WITCHES
The first:
Where are we three going to meet again Macbeth, O’Boss?

The second:
Here in the Scottish pub

The third
How do you know bitch?

The second
Haven’t you eyes? Here he is, the bloody man with his friend, boss Banquo

The first
Hallo friends!

They make predictions and equivocations…

In the meantime a tv screen again announces Duncan’s making Macbeth boss of Cawdor’s clan
….
While the First Act is a Pub/lic space

The second Act is the private mansion of the Macbeth’s, of the ambitious couple

The idea is replicating the Pompeian red of Scarface’s house, with red lights and panels suggesting glamorous painting, arms, gorgeous lamps and fashionable curtains

Lady Macbeth should remind something of the witches. She is wearing a black nightgown while, lying on the floor by a light candle [everyone should learn by heart one of the most famous among Shakespeare’s monologues:
Tomorrow and tomorrow/…
Out, out brief candle! …
Tale told by an idiot signifying nothing (V,v,16-28)]
She reads her husband’s letter
Cfr Pasquale’s writing
[She may be watching Scarlett Johansson wearing the Neapolitan dressmaker’s dress in GArrone’s Gomorra (look for those images in the movie)

Then there is the meeting of the couple
She is wearing a blood red elegant dress
She is bursting from desire…social, acquisitive ambitions

In order to be the first camorra couple she is ready to renounce maternity, to have an abortion (cfr the contemporary movie, Revolutionary Road)???

Lady Macbeth
I can’t wait
…We will move to Posillipo? We’ll have a larger house, we will buy everything, things people, politicians, markets, American Chinese, Indian A delirium of omnipotence, both private and public

…
Soundtrack
Drums
Pipes
Chimes (Renata)

The Third Act
Chain of murders
-Duncan
-Banquo
-Lady MAcduff and children
Crescendo of cruelty and horror

Behind a transparent curtain? Like a white curtain which progressively is stained with red?

-Macduff and what is a man?

The Fourth Act

The outcome is loneliness


-The cauldron (choreography of witches [Annamaria clarizia as a choreographer and Rosalia Paracuollo and others as dancers)

-Lady Macbeth alone-sleepwalking scene—again in her nightgown and in the end she lies again on the floor of the stage near a candle

-Macbeth comes and turns out the light
Monologue and fight

The performance closes with a choreography. Mara was brilliantly suggesting that it may be about a sterile Birnan wood where the people-trees come to life again, in a reborn , regenerated, hopeful dimension.

We said also many more thoings; you all are invited to modify, make suggestions and contribute, everybody.

Next week we would like to shoot the improvisation of the meeting of the bossy couple who will improvise , hopefully, by the help of Sylvia.

Also remember to memorize the monologue, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

We all want to say, on the contrary, that we work for today and tomorrow!?!

Report of January 26, 09, university theatre
Presentation/Discussion of our first draft-script, entitled ‘Macbeth o’boss
deadlines
Projection of Raffaele Morrone’s short video about Macbeth and Gomorra overlappings. This video could be the prologue of our work
Renata Savo and Pasquale Parisi play the music they’ve chosen as possible part of our performance’s soundtrack
Thinking about the set, the location –urban landscapes, Naples, New York, Mumbai—local/global location: fair is foul and foul is fair—in-betweenness: good/evil-vice/virtue
‘Napoli by 99 posse-we could play it while projecting the video. Projected at the very beginning of the performance, should include good and bad images (back to vice/virtue opposition)
Next meeting 11th February, Wednesday (to be confirmed)
CAST
‘Macbeth o’boss’
Ø Vincenzo Albano as Macbeth
Ø Elena Cuomo as Lady Macbeth
Ø Angela Diamante Lengua as the first witch
Ø Grazia Carbone as the second witch
Ø Gabriella De crescenzo as the third witch

Staff
Prof Antonella Piazza, prof Bill Papaleo-directors
Giusy-aiutoregista
Daniela di Matteo. Greta Viceré, Valeria Nuzzolo-costume and set designers
Pasquale Parisi, Laura Errico, Giusy—scripwriters
Annamaria Clarizia-choreographer
Rosalia Paracuollo-dancer
Simona Palmieri-singer
Raffaelle Marrone—video/projections editing
Renata Savo e Pasquale Parisi--soundtrac


.

Gomorra & Macbeth project

Write a setting for a specific scene (when, where) and describe the characters.

Scene I

We are in “the cavern”, a little pub bad lighted and dreary.
Three women, young but with horrible grey teeth and skinny faces, arrange their cocaine on the filthy counter, in order to create fine straight white stripes. A kind of zebra crossing of drug.
When Macbeth, one of the most important and cruel mafia bosses at the moment, enter in the pub, the three women understand immediately that he’s as upset as a big tiger in a small cage. So they offer him the drug that gives rise to a series of hallucinations…

Daniela Di Matteo

09.12.2008

Roberto Paci Dalò

(photos by courtesy of Michele Mari (c))

Brainstorming on multimedia with Roberto Paci Dalò

Roberto Paci Dalò frequentemente realizza opere in più media approfondendo aspetti percettivi diversi dello stesso materiale in relazione al linguaggio e tecnologie utilizzati di volta in volta

That is how the flier advertized and presented Roberto to Salerno audience. Very difficult to present, Roberto as he himself admits, so no more words on who or what he is or has been—we may visit his website.
Presenting what he said is not a minor task. I’ll remind you just some points of his very generous speech. First of all paradoxically he warned against the use and misuse of the monster-word multimedia. Paradoxically because the so called ‘magesterial degree’, the two years of specialization of the DAVIMUS is : ‘Scienze dello spettacolo e della produzione multimediale’ and everybody is looking around to understand what is meant by that definition.
Multimedia- Roberto said, in his perfect Irish accent, is working in more than one sector, in more than one language. It is working and imagining and inventing new professions. It is asking oneself: ‘What shall I do when I become a child?—cosa farò da piccolo’

The creative drive should unite Davimus students and staff . The contemporary dramatist/ planner/ designer is the one who inventively uses new techniques, tactics, strategies in the creative process for the making of infrastructures (servizi, attrezzature), cultural spaces, advanced cultural districts. We need desire and technology, and these are very cheap and very easy to have access to and learn (Roberto is thinking at the project of Punta Corsara in Scampia or the project of the Fondazione Morra in the area of Avvocata in Naples-a project Roberto is working at now.)

We are less and less paper people-persone cartacee.
We need to work in group

Technologies of sound and light

02.12.2008

Building a plot

Few heads, too much confusion... how to realise the abstract? I need to shout! Do we really believe in this project? I don't think so.
We have the opportunity to explode on a scene, to live in fantasy, to express our duties, talking with faces, words, colours, pictures, sounds, talking with the art through the art, give ourselves to the public, to rise the past, to see back, to show the present we stand with a mystic eye who understands, to make something special, something new, something with the taste of naiveté, inexperience, natural but it seems nothing touches you! Fear or lack of desire? The work is slow, thousand ideas in the same room fight between them, someone thinks, creates in its mind but doesn't speak, someone leaves us, someone doesn't agree, someone tries to impose himself, someone tries to recreate what's already done, we could make it but we don't know it, we'll probably arrive where they've already arrived, but we'll arrive alone, we'll be the makers of something which already exists but new for us. What did we make last Tuesday? Pietro knows well, we have no time, and now it's time to write, step by step, no structure, improvvisation and irrationality will guide us! There's no line to follow... Chaos can help us! Just 45 minutes to show and do not show the gomorra's punk and the atonement of a murderer, Macbeth. Pietro asks himself and us, how can Macbeth send his word to his lady today? A letter? Or an sms, an e-mail? Lady Macbeth sees her husband's words on the stage, the audience could listen Macbeth's voice who reads his letter and the lady's voice together as Piazza says. Can the three witches become only one? Not a witch, but a gipsy on a tv show who captures and provokes the audience with her lies. Doubt about the character, will what she says be true? This image of a gipsy is taken by a movie adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth of the 1950s intitled Jo Macbeth . We watched it during the lesson. Here Macbeth was a businessman in a city. During a dinner in a restaurant a gipsy read cards to him and his wife telling him it will be the king of the city. Lady Macbeth full of vanity tries to capture the white dressed Duncan through her beauty. We tried to analyse the film until we watched. Shakespeare in a noir, where classic and mistery are matched. The dark side of a man, of a woman of a mind, of a story, of a context, of a city. A closed atmosphere where we can breath the intimacy between characters. A little world of few people, a question mark. Next macbeth's message arrived, Lady Macbeth could turn on tv, zapping, lost in the news and aware of what happens around her, how much the husband's words are in the facts! The tv voice could be always present on the stage, showing Italian trash, rubbish, rubbish, rubbish... Pietro continues asking to solve the question of the wood? What abstract element can represent it? What can evoke it? Wood... Somethink built by wood. Another question, what sound can give atmosphere? Neomelodic sound? Touch the real or thwart it? I ask. These are the ideas which flow in the room this tuesday, what can I add ? I forgot, for t next tuesday Piazza asks the students to write Macbeth's letter to his wife, someone hides, not too clear. Pasquale' going to write the playscript, if you want to steal the pen, you can do it! What can I propose yet? I can try to give an order in disorder of my ideas. My ideas, not only mine. Create a soundtrack using programmes like flstudio, using a sound who can make vibrate human senses, sounds which disturb the scene, Shakespeare's words could be a song who enter the public's mind indirectly and faze them, three gansters called witches in code who convince Macbeth to kill Duncan promising him the power, playing with his sensibility and his weakness, human weakess, in a dark room, the grey of smoke, the white of coke matched with dialogues full of irony which can make smile and think at the same time... Giving the opportunity to the public to fight against the garbage which is eating us!

Mara Melella

18.11.2008

Summing up William Shakespeare's Macbeth


The main characters

DUNCAN - King of Scotland
MALCOLM - Duncan’s elder son
DONALBAIN - Duncan’s younger son
MACBETH - the most courageous and successful warrior in the army of King Duncan; Thane of Cawdor, Thane of Glamis
BANQUO - Macbeth’s friend and a general in the army of King Duncan.
FLEANCE - Banquo’s son
MACDUFF - the Thane of Fife
LADY MACDUFF - Macduff’s wife
MACDUFF’S SON
THREE WITCHES
SCOTTISH LORDS
SOLDIERS


The main points of the tragedy

1) First Act scene opens with the three Witches.

2) A sergeant reports to king Duncan that Macbeth has defeated the forces of Norway and Ireland.

3) Banquo and Macbeth hear the Witches’s prophecy: Macbeth shall be King but Banquo shall father a line of kings, though he himself will not be one.

4) Regicide: Macbeth kills Duncan. Fearing for their lives, Malcolm flees to England and Donalbain to Ireland.
Macbeth becomes king of Scotland as a kinsman of the dead king.

5) Macbeth hires killers to kill Banquo and his son, but Fleance escapes.
At the royal banquet, Banquo’s ghost appears, only Macbeth can see him.

6) Prophecies: the three Witches tell Macbeth to beware Macduff, that noone of woman born shall harm him and that he won’t be vanquished until Birnam Wood on Dunsinane Hill shall come against him.
Macbeth hires to kill Macduff ‘s family.

7) Macduff and Malcolm in England want to take the power from Macbeth and they plan to invade Scotland.

7a) Lady Macbeth’s sleep walking scene and her suicide.
Tomorrow and tomorrow…

8) Camouflaged by tree limbs, the army moves to the castle of Dunsinane and the battle begins.

9) Fight between Macbeth and Macduff. Macduff declares he was born untimely from his mother’s womb. Macduff beheads Macbeth.

10) Malcolm becomes king of Scotland.

Grazia Carbone

17.11.2008

On Monday, November 17th we had the last meeting with Sylvia Toone. It was one of three lessons in total, one on Friday and one on Saturday in Salerno. She gave us a series of theoretical and practical advices about how should an actor hold the stage and improve his stage presence.
We made exercises like “zip-zap-zoop” to experiment with new techniques of improvisation, which are based on the direct and immediate communication of what you want to show or express to others.
We made also excercises of relaxation and slackening which are very important for an actor because they give him the possibility to place himself in a specific situation or get into the character that he is going to play.
According to Sylvia Toone, an actor should play as he really sees what he speaks about. But to do that, a good actor has to mould his mind and put all his senses together to find a unique point of concentration (sense of hearing, smell, seeing, touching and taste). In this way he will become more aware of himself, of his body and gestures.

Grazia Carbone

14-17.11.2008

Sylvia Toone's Workshops

In order to achieve our goals (first year students should interview immigrants and build a story in English; second year students should create a stage and screen adaptation of Macbeth in a Neapolitan setting), the three meetings with Prof Sylvia Toone (The Department Library, Santa Maria dei Barbuti and the University Theatre) have offered first and second year students examples of techniques and craft which help to build trust and memory, improvisational methods - which are supports for the actor’s individual talent.


First day - 14.11.2008 – The Department Library
The body has been at the centre of our exercises and discourses. The focus of concentration have been senses and their memories with consideration of individual responses and reactions.

The eye and simulation of watching a game.
The ear and simulation of hearing.

Group solidarity formation techniques:
1-8
Zip zap zoop (receiving and transmitting impulses)


Second day - 15.11.2008 – S. Maria dei Barbuti
(photos by courtesy of Michele Mari (C))

Trust in one’s body and in others.

One in the centre with his/her eyes closed and everyone pushes him again towards the centre

Mirrors in two

Sense of tasting and smelling


Third day - 17.11.2008 - University Theatre
(photos by courtesy of Michele Mari (C))

The third day saw the active and enthusiastic participation of a large number of students. Sylvia usefully repeated that a team meets on the basis of an agreement about a common task. Every exercise has to deal with a p.o.c., point of concentration. Students and teachers have focussed on touch memory. Two teams think about an object or a substance and then individually they perform the manipulation of that object/substance in front of an audience.
Sylvia made everyone concentrate on the body and then the body moving through cold and hot elements.

The second half of the lesson was devoted to the creation of a set up. A couple of actors had to perform, the first a WHERE - a location working with physical objects and the second a WHO - trying to establish a relation. In order to share with the audience the sounds and the pictures the movements on stage may take an upstage curve or a downstage curve

In order for the show to go on the improvising actor does not have to say NO and doesn’t have to ask questions, but the impulse has to be taken and continue with a YES AND…
And also you must remember that everything takes place in the moment.

Sylvia left us with one recommendation:
- everyone has to, for some minutes every day, consciously think what his/her eyes see, ears listen to, tongue, nose throat smell taste and feel, what the body touches and by what is touched…
and the most welcome promise:
...she will come again soon!

14.11.2008

Prof. Stuart Marlow from Stuttgart Media University has shown two DVDs as examples of digital story telling (Stage on Screen):

Sacco and Vanzetti and the anti-communist, anti–anarchist, anti-immigrant hysteria in America in the twenties and thirties

Testimonies of immigrants in Germany (German and English)

11.11.2008

Macbeth's storyline

04.11.2008

28.10.2008

Pina Bausch

21.10.2008

From page to stage to screen

There's a text...and there's an actor on a stage...and he's talking about the theatre...

For a Muse of Fire

...and how interesting to see how many different performances can come out from the same written text...even different from the "scene" we had in mind while reading...

Once More Unto the Breach

14.10.2008

Is there any link between Shakespeare's Macbeth and Saviano's Gomorrah?

Macbeth is one of the most well-known tragedies by William Shakespeare. There’s the Scotland, a prophecy, a tyrannicide, and the rise and fall of a ‘wannabe-king-became cruel tyrant’ knight and his egoisme a deux with the calculating Lady. Gomorra is the groundbreaking 2006 book by Roberto Saviano, already staged and quickly transposed into the 2008 movie by Matteo Garrone.It features Naples, Camorra, money, violence, illegality, ambitious boys and ‘entrepreneurs’ who never listened to their conscience. A world in a word, the so called “Sistema”.Do the “Scottish play” and the Camorrists’ Chronicles have anything in common ? Of course they do, and we, students of the “English Language II” course, here at the DaViMus, are going to catch similarities, work on the differences, shape atmospheres and characters merging two worlds so distant and different, and at the same time so close, in our wonderful, amazing, forthcoming theatrical performance.During the 14th October lesson this project was presented (obviously, enthusiastically received by the students) and there was the first debate of a -likely- long series. We first tried to point out some of the concepts shared by both of the texts, for example the avidity, the eagerness of power, above all; then the betrayal, which paves the way to a new ‘boss’ both in Macbeth and in many of Gomorra’s tales, as well as the role of the woman in this cynical universes (Lady Macbeth is not very far from some of the Camorra women), and the use of fear as a mean to subdue the will of people. After some more or less abstract speeches, somebody suggest to start thinking about something more concrete, like the location of our play… well, maybe we’ve really gotta start talking concrete: but let’s not forget that our adventure has just begun, and there’s still a long, long way to go…

Pasquale Parisi