Private Eye

by IRAA Theatre
Directed by Renato Cuocolo
With Roberta Bosetti, Renato Cuocolo

Media artist: Warwick Page
Visual Artist: Andree Gersbeck
Production Manager: Rita Bardeggia & Cristina Marras
Administration: John Paxinos
Press Agent: Meredith King

Texts from:  Roberta Bosetti &  Renato Cuocolo

“It is as if the real and the imaginary were running after each other, as if each were reflected in each other, around a point of indiscernibility.

Indiscernibility implies that we no longer know what is real or imaginary, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask” C&B

Private Eye

Private Eye is a performance about identity. Whereas The Diary Project was about the search of identity through memory, Private Eye is about the construction of a fictitious, but not less real, identity, starting from the idea that one is so much more authentic the closer one is to what one has dreamt of being.

Private Eye aims to create a world in which nothing is what it appears to be, in a sort of terrible fascinating bewilderment, like suddenly finding oneself in the dark of an unknown place.

Inspired by the tradition of the noir genre, by the hard boiled with its dark ladies, the performance evokes those suggestion not through the literature but, as it is usual in the Cuocolo/Bosetti body of work, through a challenge to oneself and the spectator. A singular spectator, because the view is fitted like in a groove-and-tongue joint and the performance has its climax in the open one-to-one relation.

Phase 1: Production

August 2004, Perth. Renato C. asks a private detective to secretly follow and film his wife, Roberta B.

Starting from that illicit and intimate material Private Eye is now born, presented in the rooms of a hotel for one spectator at the time.

A journey with uncertain boundaries, between the emotions we feel and those we represent for ourselves, between what we believe to be and what we are forced to be. Illusion, representation, and make-believe overlap becoming at the end one thing with what is .

Phase 2: Presentation

“At an appointed time, each individual audience member meets with Renato in the foyer of the Grand Hyatt to see the material gathered by the investigator. You are then taken to a room in the hotel to meet Roberta – the subject of this spying. Her discussion with you is the basis of the performance, along with the unexpected encounter with a stranger we can't reveal. Inspired by the tradition of the film noir genre, Private Eye is a further extension of the challenging and confronting theatre that Cuocolo and Bosetti have become famous for around the world.Cuocolo /Bosetti Private Eye”

From the program of the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts 2005

In the first room (the Hotel Lobby) Renato presents to the Spectator 1 the video material and the pictures provided by the real private eye. Then the Spectator 1 is invited into the second room (a Double Bedroom) where he is welcomed by Roberta . Here the central part of the performance unfolds. Roberta plays alternatively herself and her double :Vera . Every section is interrupted by the sudden and untimely arrival of the next on line spectator (Spectator 2). At this point, Spectator 1 is lead behind a fake wall, purposely constructed in the room so to allow him to assist without being seen (through a special mirror) to the changing of personality of Roberta and to the meeting with the unknowing new arrived Spectator 2. Then, at the untimely arrival of yet another spectator (Spectator 3), Spectator 1 is led outside the room and Spectator 2 replaces him behind the fake wall. At the exit every spectator is provided with a secret code through which he will be able to access a special section of the IRAA Website where he can find further film and documental material related to his own encounter.

The hotel has been chosen as performance-space for this project because the hotel is felt as a place of passage, a place where one stops precariously during a trip. Hotels convey the idea of precariousness, of moving existence, and so the theme and central point of Private Eye is about the mobility of identity, about the journey through the variety of people that we are or that we could be.

In a Hotel we are far from home. We have perhaps just left someone or been left; we are in search of work, sex or company, adrift in transient places. It is often night and through the window lie darkness and threat of a strange city. In Hotel lobbies and hotel rooms we may dilute a feeling of isolation in a lonely public place and hence rediscover a distinctive sense of community. The lack of domesticity, the bright lights and anonymous furniture may come as a relief from what are often the false comforts of home. It may be easier to give way to sadness here than in a living room with wallpaper and framed photos, the decor of a refuge that has let us down.

Journey are the midwives of thought. Hotel rooms offer a opportunity to escape our habits of mind. If we are drawn to the hotel ‘s enviroment it is perhaps because, in spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts, in spite of their garish colors and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.

Each section will be shaped through the interactive relationship with the live audience.

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

It is not just life entering theatre but also theatre entering life and shaping it.Real life space and theatre space overlap.

Crafting an artistic “self”

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, art galleries and now hotel rooms. 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 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.

Many contemporary artists, from Cindy Sherman to Nan Goldin   and Vanessa Beecroft just to cite few of them, have been investigating the theme of crafting an artistic “self”. Starting with The Secret Room, Cuocolo/Bosetti have arisen great international interest developing a work striving towards this direction.

Does the face that peers out from your photo ID define who you are? Have you ever asked yourself “who do I want to be?”. Of course, people create themselves through clothing, hairstyles, tattoos, piercing, and body shaping. But new prospects for identity construction now clutter the cultural horizon. The current marketplace abounds with body-transforming hormones, plastic surgeries, and cross-gender reassignment operations. Constructing an identity on the Internet is unencumbered by any physical counterpart. The right to free imaginative invention of a self has earned cultural consensus.

But even the artists who have chosen to stick to the facts of their biographies can't avoid engaging in option-selection. This is because even accurate projections involve selecting definitive traits from the infinite array of possibilities and then crafting these traits into functional identities.