The Diary Project

The Diary Project.
After the great international success of the “Interior Sites Project” Cuocolo/Bosetti have devised  a new performance: “The Diary Project” which has been presented in the Arts Centre of Melbourne  as one of the central piece of 2004 Melbourne International Festival of the Arts for 35,492 audience members.

From the day of the premiere Cuocolo/Bosetti will go to live in the theatre where the performance will take place. The Diary Project lasts 24 hours from 10.00 a.m. on one day  to 10.00 a.m. the following day. During this time and for the entire season Cuocolo/Bosetti will live inside the theatre without  leaving it. The strategy of the duration attacks the real by blurring the differences between real time and theatre time. The theatrical event becomes life.

The stage space will be filled with all the furniture, personal belongings and possessions owned by Cuocolo and Bosetti.

The couple’s home which was the protagonist of the “Interior Sites Project” will be therefore completely emptied in order to fill the public space of the theatre with their personal objects; The 2004 Diary will be read and commented from the matrimonial bed at the center of the stage. Visual materials ( black and white photographic panels ) and the voices of the people whom they  have encountered during the year will be interwoven with  the live performance of the diary.

The audience had live access to the performance buying a ticket for one or  for all the 6 daily sections of the project. Each section will be one hour long .  The 6 sections of the Project have been put together autonomously and, are at once interconnected with each other. In the different sections different parts of the diary will be read and different narratives will be developed. Each section will be shape with the interactive relationship with the live audience.

Theatre will be used in an intensely personal way to understand one’s life by analyzing recent memories and discerning a pattern in the onward momentum of existence.

The diary is meant as a starting point to trigger both personal and collective memory. Therefore it is not just life entering theatre but also theatre entering life and  shaping  it. In “The Diary Project”,  personal space is exposed to the outside viewer. In this way the viewers have access to an intimacy which is usually denied to them.  Real life space and theatre space overlap.

Moreover the performance will be interactive, with the audience present in the theatre and a chat room open to the public connected online.

The Shock of the Real

There are many ways to imagine the place of theatre. One is built of bricks and mortar with a red curtain and  graduated seats; another is an imaginary place full of political juxtapositions and psychological encounters. This last approach has taken us, literally, from theatre buildings to private houses   to urban streets, and back to theatre again. It is a complex  theatrical journey that incorporates mythical themes of quest and search, and also serves as a map of cultural desires, dreams, and fears.

In the artistic adventure of these years one can identify these two opposing trends: one directed towards the celebration of appearance, the other oriented towards the experience of reality.

We believe that one of the task of Theatre is that of providing us with a stronger and more intense perception of reality itself.

This trend  places a special emphasis on the idea of partaking,  becoming involved and experiencing the performance as a perturbation, a sudden intuition, a shock. A veritable burst of reality into the rarefied and highly fictitious world of theatre.

The artwork that turns us into witnesses leaves us, above all, unable to stop thinking, talking and reporting about what we have seen. We are left, like the people in Brecht’s poem who have witnessed a road accident, still standing on the street corner discussing what happened, motivated by our responsibility to events.

The Theatre of Time

The stories told in “The Diary Project” have the style and flavor of a diary and like a diary they have the power to open wide a facet of the void, as in a diary they have the force to assail the comedy of relationships that exists between people and the lucidity to disclose the imposture of daily life.

Memory, this personal archive, which keeps alive what is distant in time, is the way to  recognize ourselves in and amongst the community at large.

This is the theatre of time - the exact opposite of sentimental recollections. I remember in order to understand. Memory as act, not as passive sensual pleasure; to dispose of knowledge of the past and transform it into evidence of the present.

Memory does not mean regressing from the present to the past but, on the contrary, progressing from the past to the present.

We want to reflect upon the interplay between what constitutes Art and what is everyday life.