By Luigi Tarini
We have met and interviewed Marco Paolini, who presented an unusual comical repertoire during the conference held on Wednesday 21st of June at the Institute of Romance and Germanic Studies of the University of London, event parallel to the performance U-381 WORK IN PROGRESS at the Camden People’s Theatre, inspired by one of his civil stories.
Marco utilises his art, his production, as a means to communicate his thoughts; and for this artisan – definition that he prefers to artist – art is the result of signs left in time, which get to signify a reference point that bears company, marks the way, excites and fascinates, that remains and does not consume, exactly because stratified during that time. Henceforth art, from this point of view and despite of the art market, is something that lasts.
This sense of becoming and changing makes him consider his theatrical career as something continuously moving, rather than a pyramid to climb. So, far from his fame as a civil narrator – which made him known by the Italian audience – the actor presented a funny and fresh monologue recorded years ago for the TV and edited only recently, then carrying on live with the accompaniment of the singer and guitarist Lorenzo Monguzzi who, along with his band Mercanti di Liquore (Liqueur Merchants) collaborates with the actor.
From this monologue Paolini took the incipit to talk about his awkward relationship with television. Difficult, in his experience, was finding a compromise between the TV exigencies and techniques from one side and his artisan profession from the other. The artisan works on the words to communicate by voice something that does not need captions, editing effects, and even less commercials interruptions, especially when talking about “serious” topics. These are mainly the reasons why, after the success of Vajont and the collaboration with the TV program Report, he decided to devote himself entirely to live shows.
The TV world is made by images, and with images – according to Marco – all the present society feeds us. Of what we have in front of our own eyes just a few, because of laziness or incapacity, find a real dramatisation. “We are all directors, even the worst incompetent bungler in the audience is a director of what he sees and it is he who made the editing in his head” tells us Marco. “Reality is probably big narrations, is epic, is something that neither commercials nor politics can make us understand”. From this thought descends the role of art and of his spoken word as means to reconstruct reality. In these terms, Paolini compares the artist to an almighty God. For him the word is the origin of his theatrical production: he is an actor, a troubadour we could say, a Middle Age poet who thinks and talks in the first place, and who writes only in order to remember his ideas, bringing the writing back to his primary function.
Even because of this power bound to the spoken word, Paolini declares himself incapable to perform his role in another language. Communicating is one thing, expressing yourself is something different. He describes his experience in the USA, where he worked for five months and acted in English, as a dive in the English chewed in the mouth, for somebody who had never studied it before.
He has already been in England, guest of the Italian Culture Institute, after the success of Vajont; he states to be fascinated by the way this country drew from our cynicism; “By now England has a political class that seems photocopied from ours and a mentality which appears less demure, too”. A country which, observed from an external point of view, looks to him as having lost the meaning of things and moreover that elegance by which it used to be characterised.
This is the umpteenth slap in the face to a society adrift, where his role as an actor looks like that of the fool, the Shakespearian character who reverses images and words to tell the truth.
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