Part 1:    Love Me Tender
Part 2:    The Sandman

Considering that they are unreal,
dreams have a rather curious persistence.

The Persistence of Dreams starts with a phone call.
This phone call is the key to access an alien, parallel world.
In the evening, at the set time, the house owner receives a phone call in which they are asked to switch all lights off, to create darkness.
Now it is dark. Soon afterwards Roberta rings the door bell. Roberta’s presence in the house is contained in the space of two words: darkness/light. The classical words marking the beginning and the end of every performance in every theatre around the world.

The darkness has a double quality: ignorance, confusion, mystery but also source of beauty. It brings the relief through which beauty can be recognise. It announces the beginning of the spectators’ and Roberta’s search to unravel a concealed world.

Once the visit is over and Roberta has left the house, a second phone call will announce that the lights can be switched on again.

The spectators’ everyday space becomes recognisable again. Just like the house in which we lived and in which we presented The Secret Room, or the hotel rooms from Private Eye, also the houses of our spectators’ are not simple backdrops but reality traps. Life space and theatre space overlap.

Estrangement and privacy. The Persistence of Dreams confronts the apparent antinomy of the opposites: stranger/intimate, public/private, reality/fiction, actor/person that ends up fusing in the spectator’s particular and privileged experience.

The Persistence of Dreams searches the traces of a otherness that refuses to be completely tamed. The disturbing effect of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the untamable in the domesticity.

The Persistence of Dreams is developing in a new direction than previous projects realised by IRAA Theatre.

In part 1: Love Me Tender - the spectator enters one at the time into a private space, the performer’s home. In The Sandman it is the performers who visits the spectator’s home.

The use of the house of a member of the audience is not an artifice but is rather an integral and profound part of the project that deals with the theme of the visit by a stranger, dealing with the stranger’s apparition inside the familiar interior, inside the known. The stranger is a borderline phenomenon par excellence.

The performance takes place in the house of the spectator who booked the performance. The house owner will decide how many people are going to watch the show on that evening. Max number of spectators for every evening is 10.

The people we’ll meet represent a group of strangers, just like we are strangers to them. There is no relation, but there are all the elements for relatedness. A space shared, a group of people, the wait for something. Something that can happen. Why this invitation? Why have you invited this unknown guest to your house? What are the hidden expectations?

Roberta had a dream. A dream that left a long lasting impression. In the dream a house, a group of people, writing on a body. Now, with The Sandman starts the search for that place, that house. The difficult attempt to find again that place from the dream, to live it again, to insert it back into reality.

“It was a recurrent dream. Maybe a little bit different every time, but recurring. Dreams have a long lasting life, on the contrary of what people normally believe. Still today I happen to dream things that I dreamt of when I was a child. Considering that they are unreal, dreams have a rather curious persistency. They are the only thing I know, maybe together with fairytales, so full of significance but void of explanations.”

The more they are closely connected to one another or recurrent, the greater the danger not to be able to tell them apart from reality any more.

Dreams, the oneiric world, are a grounding part of the strangeness of the visible world, just like the most intimate and originarial experience is pervaded by moments of unconsciousness and unintentionality. The stranger that, within western politics, is assumed coming only from the outside cannot revel himself, but like an intruder, like something that strikes us as disquieting, like something that cannot be drawn to jail; if we take it as something that strikes because disquieting, the stranger appears in the form of something extra-ordinary, that is something that doesn’t find a suitable place in the order that is reigning from time to time.

The strangeness is not an accessory moment of the experience, but rather its constitutive character. A possibility, different and genuine, to address us to the stranger does exist and is indeed retraceable, but on condition that one stops talking about the stranger to start instead to draw one’s thoughts towards a discourse that takes its moves from the stranger. The surprise of Rimbaud’s famous refrain: JE est un autre (I is a other) And it’s exactly in this surprise, in the always open possibility of its turning up, that one’s own never ceases to deal with that stranger that has always been inhabiting oneself.

The IRAA Theatre Commany, by Cuocolo/Bosetti has been touring Europe for the past 18 months, presenting 10 seasons of their major works: The Secret Room, The Diary Project and Private Eye.

All premiered in Melbourne within the Melbourne International Festival of The Arts, with the support of Australia Council.

In the past 2 years 7 publications were released on their work.
In Italy - "The Secret Room" by Stefano Pasquini  and "Teatronauti del Caos" By Marco Palladini
In Australia - "Contemporary Australian Drama" by Leonard Radic,  "Changing Places" edited by John Cameron, "Melbourne International Arts Festival 86-05" by Paul Clarkson
In England - "Greek Tragedy in Performance Australia 1984/2005", and in the Czech Republic "Medea in Australia: responses to Greek Tragedy in contemporary Australian theatre" both by Paul Monaghan

Cuocolo/Bosetti works has been object of extensive coverage by European press and television.