Antechamber: literally beginning, premise, stage preceding the attainment of something. On this occasion, however, it serves as a conclusion. Anticamera is in fact the title of the last episode of Motel Project: a trilogy of performances created by the Nanou Group consisting of "three rooms," which began back in 2008 and ended this year.
On Wednesday, December 14 at the Ferrara Comunale's Fuoristrada Review, the company offered us the chance to attend so that we could finally reveal-or not?-the answers to the questions that the first two episodes had raised.
Before the performance, we at Occhiaperti caught up with the Nanou Group for a brief interview. Marco Valerio Amico, who with Rhuena Bracci is performer and creator of the project, and Roberto Rettura, the group's sound designer, welcome us intoa small dressing room: small yes, but not as small as the white box in which the performer moves during the show!

In fact, the performance begins on the notes of Song to the siren written by Tim Buckley and sung by Elisabeth Fraser. "Sail to me, let me enfold you, here I am, waiting to hold you." And like a siren, it seems to be that square, white box that calls Rhuena's body inside. The light illuminates her feet, which slowly slide all the way into that miniature room. There is a chair, a reference to the first episode, and two glasses.

But let's go in order. "Motel," Marco tells us, "was born out of curiosity to see what happens by placing a body in a space and adding clues that connote a habitat" . In the first room the two bodies walk around a table, sit on it and vanish underneath it, the atmosphere is both icy and retro, like a silent film, the viewer expects something to happen soon but the tension remains. Marco and Rhuena on stage move around suggesting to the viewer storytelling rubble, "as in Carver's stories, which begin when the triggering event has already happened or is about to happen in the immediate future," Marco elucidates to us. In the second room, red with noir tones, the tension present in the first spills over into a scabrous event: a murder. The purple-colored sofas are perhaps the only ones who know exactly what has happened.

In Anticamera, on the other hand, inside the box the performer continually rearranges, rearranges, moves, even changes gravity.

The viewers' eyes remain fixed within those four white sides.
"One has the impression of looking at the show as if through the lock of a door, this increases the possibility of imagery rather than describing a contextualized situation. In Anticamera, however, the viewer ends up peering into another dimension: surrealist, multifaceted, almost cubist."

The restlessness of not finding a stable position in such a small place, like Lewis Carroll's Alice when she is too big for the White Rabbit's house, shines through. After an initial identification with her body, the focus shifts to the details. There are two glasses and she is alone, longingly caressing an empty chair. Will this be an allusion to the murder in the second room? And where did the "he" from the first one go? What epilogue is proposed to us?

"The solution to the unspoken occurred before or after the performance, before and after each movement. The goal is not to have narrative continuity, but to create a sequence of gaps linked to each other: the resulting fragmentation is presented in a cinematic way. As if the performance were an exhibition of photographs, there is a blank wall space between each shot."

So over comes a man with a top hat who slowly closes the box and makes us distance ourselves from it. The Nanou Group has the ability to masterfully construct the scene with lighting and sound. It has the ability to transform the space of a stage with minute light variations studied in detail. The box becomes a table and the mind goes to the question-archetype: to the curious, primitive and never obvious "why"? And one is left waiting as if they are about to reveal the key. But the man in the top hat lingers and ends up teasing the viewer, who ultimately finds himself back to square one.
That's exactly the end the company is aiming for: "One is not looking for Spielbergian-style emotionality but for an individualistic bewilderment added to an empathetic drive. Not to leave each person with a personal explanation but to suggest the answer to the question. The solution is there and it is very clear: You know what I'm talking about precisely is a phrase that appears in the second play."

With Marco and Roberto, the conversation ranges all over the place.

There were already ingredients for Motel in the first show, Namoro. With this project I metabolized the desire to be able to grasp an elsewhere, to capture and convey the magic of the little magician but trying to make the trick obvious. With this we close a parenthesis but something new will surely be born.

Motel takes inspiration from photographers Robert Frank and Gregory Crewdson and painter Edward Hopper. With "Anticamera," however, we have reclaimed the abstract from which we come, so the habitat that is staged is geometric or partial.

Direct take, that is, the acquisition and reproduction of sound simultaneous with the performers' action, was not used in the third episode. However, we did use it in the first two episodes: it amplifies the relationship between sound, light, and performers' action. Microphoning can "emphasize or subtract actions." This is how the greatest cinematic masterpieces are born. In the third one we preferred to give more importance to the piece as a soundtrack. [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/25669665[/vimeo]

No, every work is designed for stage vision. Giulia Fontanini collaborated and translated the performance with his personal eye, the video camera. In the same way Laura Arlotti did so with the camera. Photography and video are helpful in mapping the lines of action that photographic and film art had within the project but it always remains their very personal vision created post performance.

Well, if you have to create something together, which happens in any work, there is a fierce and direct exchange with any kind of collaborator. The same relationship I have with Rhuena in the group I have with Roberto. The show admits no flaws and the goal is defined and on a deadline, whereas a relationship can achieve a goal, if it can be called that, even over 30 years. Another difference is that while a relationship, the word itself says it, involves two individuals, a show is based on the collaboration of several people: in the specific case Motel had the contribution of as many as 7 people; ultimately I would say that the two are quite distinct.

Of course, there is a difference. I remember a meeting with the audience in Belgium, and it was useful and constructive: one audience member disagreed with the choice of sound and stayed to talk, civilly and even animatedly, to put forward his point of view. Often in Northern Europe next to theaters there are small restaurants where one can stop to create a cozy atmosphere and exchange impressions and ideas. I remember in '98 in Berlin that a seat in the stalls cost 10 marks, 9 thousand liras, and in the small restaurant next door with 6 marks you could eat a single dish....

Rather than a current, I find myself with what is apparently different from me but has a kindred substance. Certainly there is in common the dislocation from the linearity of storytelling. It is no longer necessary to start from a predetermined formula rather elements from other arts are appropriated. The only constant that remains from earlier theater is frontality. Instead, there grows a hybridization in the attitude to approaching the work, for example using a cinematic sound for a live performance. Then of course there are ongoing attempts at settling.

Well, I can't tell you that. You'll see it in the performance. It fits into a compositional-oniric dynamic that is meant to convey empathic associations. Like dreaming of someone recognizing them while knowing that in reality that person is physiognomically different. The dream-show, it gains identity while losing its immediate recognizability.

It would seem, therefore, that the epilogue of the story is not assumed as a new notion but is reacquainted with it as in a dejà-vu. Remaining a few minutes astonished, in that "I think I understand" that escapes the mind and hands.
At the end of the performance the empty box remains alone and naked. Either as a white underbelly from which it all begins or as a portal through which we will all pass or have passed.
Raymond Carver concluding the presentation of his best short stories wrote: "If we are lucky, no matter whether writers or readers, we will finish the last couple of lines of a short story and sit a moment or two in silence... Our body temperature will have risen, or fallen a degree. Then after resuming regular breathing, we will get up and move on to our next occupation: life. Always life."