Il Ministero della Solitudine

After the success of ERT/Teatro Nazionale’s production When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell, which earned her the UBU Best Direction Award in 2019, author and director Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli signs this new performance by lacasadargilla together with director and sound designer Alessandro Ferroni. The work, which is the result of a devised process, benefits from the collaboration of Fabrizio Sinisi, dramaturg, and Marta Ciappina, movement director.
The idea of the performance stems from an international political news: the appointment in January 2018 by the government of the United Kingdom of the world’s first Minister of Loneliness, as a way to tackle the emotional, physical and social discomfort caused by loneliness. The Ministry, an “institution with a politically ambiguous nature and uncertain purposes”, was then created the following year.
Starting from this story, lacasadargilla company has initiated a reflection around a place – both real and imaginative – able to use narrative devices and language to operate on the desires, the ‘collective repressed’ and the imaginations of an age that increasingly requires to carefully reflect on the communities of the living.
The result is a devised performance for five actors, structured through flashes, encounters and accidents, as well as physical scores that drift towards dance. The project investigates loneliness intended first of all as a sense of incapacity, as the struggle of desire – something that can’t, by definition, be controlled – to be fulfilled, having in itself a hope that is either too high, reckless or exaggerated to ever find realization. But the project also focuses on that specific kind of loneliness into which one sinks when something is irrecoverable and it seems that nobody cares.

“While maintaining a ‘light’ and incidental nature – as in the sudden realization that one’s life is enclosed within an aquarium – we imagined a structure made of five events, five narratives of loneliness. The political nature of the Ministry is defined as substantially ambiguous and tragically comic. Is it a place where the liberation of desire can mitigate isolation? What is the status of a person who is lonely? Is there some kind of allowance for solitude? What does it consist of and who is entitled to it? Which requirements does one need to meet in order to be defined ‘lonely’ and to, therefore, belong to such category? It’s the scandal of loneliness. It’s the crowding of our lives by those who are absent, whether they are alive, deceased, ghosts or simply the multitude of missed encounters. A solitude that is extremely contemporary, with an insidious joyfulness and an unreasonable lightness. Solitude as an atlas of memories, as a catalogue of gestures to help us travel the world and retain something that belongs to ‘us’; it’s a loneliness that is embodied by specific objects, almost ‘survival kits’: a cardboard box containing a whole life, a jar of homemade honey, a bright green plastic plant, a pic-nic set ready to be used, which become ‘pockets of stories’ as well as extreme and numinous tools for an extra-ordinary life”.
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