The Nature of Things

Season 1: Relics and Time

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

Bosetti is a powerful and subtle performer and this is a beautifully crafted piece. She and Cuocolo continue to devise and present work of intricate simplicity that challenges and rewards audiences. Four and half stars.
Bill Perret (The Sunday Age)

Step by step, the show imperceptibly draws us into the particular intimacy of theatre, disrupting our expectations so that we might listen, might pay attention in a way that becomes fruitful for our own memories, our own imaginings. It takes the conventions of social encounter and makes theatre from them. It is, in the most subtle and undramatic way, profoundly stirring. And, finally profoundly beautiful.
Alison Croggon (Theatre Notes)

It all starts with a house. Not just any house of course, but the house of our childhood, the Mother House, the Founder House, that still exists in reality but that lives even more in the memory.

This house is in a town in Italy, Vercelli, via Ariosto is the street, number 85. There I was born and I have lived and I have returned many times since.

In the Nature of Things this house is connected through the net with the houses in which from time to time we live and present our performances around the world. The house of the childhood is full of things, the house in which we live is empty. One is devoid of human presences the other is filled with them (the spectators). These two houses are like the negative and the positive of a photo: they complement each other. One is the shadow of the other. One is the double of the other.

In this new series of performances The Nature of Things, we chose every time an object, particularly meaningful, in its uncanny and oblique way, and on this object we work. We would like for these objects to be able to bring back colour, smell, sound, and physical presence of things and people that we have loved. The density and the flavour of life, and of the times in which we live.

We think that the relationships between people – mother, father, and child; lovers, relatives, friends – are the core of everything. What is happening between you and the world, what you think of yourself and how you place yourself in the world, what kind of information you get and what’s the process of achieving it. How the other is present in you, and how you consider yourself as human being – responsibilities, pleasures, changes, loss.

These objects are our memory triggers. Stories of resemblance, sameness, and identity, coming out of real life and presented in a house, the theatre of our time.

The present cultural obsession with memory is symptomatic of a crisis in the structure of temporality. We believe that unlocking the past is central to making sense of the present and theatre could contribute to uncovering hidden layers, interpreting and reconstructing.

These objects and their adjoining texts, will reveal our compulsive rituals, obsessions, and fantasies, where memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and loss are interwoven with audience’s experience.

In the first season of The Nature of Things, that we have called Relics and Time, the starting object is the first memory that occurred to us while thinking at the house of the childhood: the woven fabrics of a kitchen table cloth.

At the centre of everything there is an image. An image that binds us to the past times and still reverberating and still into the present.

From that place where we have lived, it is as if a fragment remained, motionless in time, which we remember without effort, without searching for it, which doesn’t require recognition because it is the first of many memories that will come later, with an effort. The image that doesn’t require reconstruction, sometimes appears unrighteous or eccentric. Why is it so?

Why of that place, of all the life spent in that place, once evoked, that blurred image surfaces more and still, immediately, that object, that shadow on the wall. Why among all the significant things, full of meaning, the woven material of the kitchen table cloth surfaces. Not the sentences, or the events that we consider important, and that only later on we are going to connect to that first image. That we do not understand in the first instance, the woven, the white and green crossing of the table cloth, that now, I believe to remember, was made out of cotton.

When we thought about associating this Australian house in which we are now with the house of the childhood in Italy, it has been as if immediately, the improbable and familiar colours of that tablecloth sprang to mind.

We want to reflect upon the interplay between what constitutes Art and what is everyday life. Like in the very successful The Secret Room and Private Eye, the house of The Nature of Things is not a backdrop for the stage but a trap for reality. Real life space and theatre space overlap.

Our desire is to break down the boundaries between art and life in such a way that personal spaces are exposed to the outside viewer. In this way the viewers have access to an intimacy, which is usually denied to them.

Our house/theatre opens from dusk to dawn, and therefore the transactions going on in it will be of a nocturnal nature, tied up but in the same time subtracted from the oneiric time of sleep.

Cuocolo/Bosetti are one of the most successful Australian theatre stories. Last year they toured for 12 months in Europe presenting 8 seasons of their major works: The Secret Room, The Diary Project and Private Eye. All premiered in Melbourne with the Melbourne International Festival of The Arts.