by Bernard-Marie Koltès

Played and directed by

Teatrino Giullare

Teatrino Giullare Production

with the support of Regione Emilia Romagna,

Provincia di Bologna and Comune di Bologna

My characters want to live and are prevented from doing so, they are living beings, banging their heads against a brick wall. Bernard-Marie Koltès

 

A visual trap full of shadows, illusions, symbols, artifices and mere glimmers of humanity. 

Characters who are prevented from living, blocked heads and isolated hands suspended in a vacuum, fighting, playing, whiling away the time; a woman as bearer of humanity, the only one who can venture beyond, go into the shadows and become shadow herself without, however, being able to save herself in the battle against the obstacles, from the abyss that separates two worlds that communicate as if on the brink of a precipice. The protagonists shift with precarious balance in a theatrical ambience that oscillates, tilts, projects and deforms so as to open us up to the poetry of a work that truly appears to contain everything, presenting us with flashes of comic genius in a drama loaded with tension, suffering, fear and pleasure.

Africa, night time, a building site, night watchmen, three Frenchmen, a dead workman and a barred entrance that evokes the dark shadow of a mysterious African, bank notes, hallucinations, catastrophes, a woman, a tree, a few flowers, games, fears, laughs, wounds, plots, fireworks-the end.

After FINALE DI PARTITA (Endgame) which won the Italian National Critics Prize and ALLA META (Destination) which won the Special Ubu Prize, the Teatrino Giullare closes the project BECKET-BERNHARD-KOLTES AND ARTIFICE ON THE STAGE with this new production, BLACK BATTLE WITH DOGS.

 The hidden African world of Koltès is presented through an alternating world of light and shadows, sounds and voices in the night, symbols, with cinematic-style panoramas and close-ups which enhance the text’s both claustrophobic and apocalyptic nature. This is an exemplary tale of cruelty with no means of escape, which draws, inevitably, to its tragic, final conclusion.

A thrilling and very delicate theatrical machine; Teatrino Giullare once again hits the centre with intelligence and amazing inventions. Claudia Cannella, Hystrio
 

Performance of great fascination, suggestion of imaginative crudeness, played on the sound, on the given and embezzled sign, charming, a magnificently devised scenic mechanism that allows the spectators to enter in a limbo with astounding contours. Alan Mauro Vai, Teatro.org

 

The show is beautiful and intriguer, renders homage to the language of Koltès and deserves a long tour. Simone Pacini, Grigo.org

 

Teatrino Giullare is an unic example in the contemporary theatre, difficultly findable also abroad . Working near the limit of lifeless has allowed the Giullare to escape all the categories, aligning the poetic terms of direction, actoric and figurative search. Lucia Cominoli, Gazzetta of Modena