After exploring works by Perec, London, and Melville, the Roman company now turns to Chekhov, staging for Biennale Teatro 2024 a reinterpretation of one of the Russian playwright’s most renowned works.
Muta Imago (Latin for ‘silent image’) is a theatre company established in Rome in 2006 by director Claudia Sorace and playwright and sound artist Riccardo Fazi as well as, by extension, “everyone who has ever been, or will be, involved in the production of our plays.” Three Sisters, an adaptation of Chekhov’s work, comes after Ashes of 2022 and Sonora Desert of 2021. Together, the three are an investigation on the relationship between time, memory, and identity.
The theme of remembering in your play.
Our play stages Chekhov’s story as it is retraced, reincarnated, and lived again in each of the three protagonists: Olga, Masha, and Irina. Our memory does not work linearly: our present is continuously interfered with by everything we remember and everything we desire. Our bodies, our minds, keep moving despite us, despite the control we think we have on them. Often, this happens beyond the scope of anything logical or causative. We are vibrating particles guided by a mysterious synchronization that sometimes, for a split second, allows for some sense.
Three Sisters as part of Muta Imago’s research programme.
The first duty of a theatre director is to read, to immerse in stories, tales, dramas imagined by someone else before them. We need to let faraway worlds pass through us before we meet one that inspires us to make a sort of journey. For a few years, we have been doing exactly this with theatre pieces. Chekhov’s Three Sisters is a first foray into this itinerary.
To widen our vision, to get a better understanding of reality and of others.
It’s all about imagining possibilities, encounters, access, and perceptions. Every show we produce, every project, aims at finding the space and the time for a real encounter to happen. It is ourselves we shall meet, even earlier than reality and others. We love to work on anything that modernity is silent on, forgets, or suppresses, maybe because it is not deemed functional, useful, positive. It’s all about underground, hidden feelings, which we neglected for too long, and about modes of dealing with reality that all too often we forget about, but they are truly what make us human: amazement, despair… even love, or homesickness.
A vision for your future.
At this moment, we believe it is important to work to give life and a possibility of existence to all those forms of theatre that are really about the present. A critical, complex, extraordinarily problematic present that deserves to be lived fully to get but a chance, for us, to imagine some future.
