Franco Evangelisti’s Die Schachtel and its filmic transposition by Gregory Markopoulos

Gianmario Borio

Università degli Studi di Pavia

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The multimedia art work, based on the interaction of words, images and sound, emerged over several decades in a development involving music quite as much as the other performing arts. In their exploration of the performing space, actors’ body language and vocal possibilities, the protagonists of avant­garde theatre – from Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor to Julian Beck, from Peter Brooks to Eugenio Barba and Carmelo Bene – made the boundaries of theatre permeable, opening it up to issues being faced in sculpture, dance and music. A complementary process took place in the musical domain with the theatralization of performance. In Water Walk (1959) and Theatre Piece (1960) John Cage showed how scenic action can be derived directly from the music, how sound and image can refer to a unitary principle, and how gesture and sound can be linked by a scale of audiovisual values. Variations V (1965) and HPSCH (1969) contemplate forms of interaction between the various components, attributing a key role to electronic technologies. In these same years Mauricio Kagel developed the concept of “instrumental theatre” and made some short films based on pre-composed scores – for example Match für drei Spieler (Bizzaro 2007). In these and other composers, the experimenta­tion carried out in music theatre played its part in a process of convergence of the arts which can be considered a feature of the avantgardes in the second half of the 20th century (Adorno 2003 and 1995).

Die Schachtel, “azione mimo-scenica” composed by Franco Evangelisti in 1962-1963 on an idea of the artist Franco Nonnis, represents a significant epi­sode in the ‘proto-history’ of multimedia art. The aesthetic and technical coordinates had been outlined in Luigi Nono’s Intolleranza 1960 and Aldo Cle­menti’s Collage (1961). Both these works relied on a collaboration between composer and artist: Emilio Vedova in the first case and Achille Perilli in the second (De Benedictis 2001, 2007 and 2009; Lux-Tortora 2002; Tortora 2003). Nono and Clementi started out from a recognition of the limits facing music theatre, even when it relied on the expressionist aesthetic. Nonetheless Nono – who had taken an interest in Majakovskij and Mejerchol’d thanks to the medi­a­tion of Angelo Maria Ripellino and subsequently, on his own initiative, in Václav Kašlík and Josef Svoboda of the National Theatre, Prague – did not entirely re­nounce a representative approach to drama. For his “scenic action” he established some topics (intolerance, oppression, torture, the scission of the ego) that served as centres of gravity for the sung text, the music and the stag­ing. Whereas Clementi opted for a radical formalization of the audiovisual text: Col­lage has neither a plot nor characters, but it does trace the stages of a physical or alchemical process, the transformation of matter through to the appearance of the homunculus and its definition by means of a complex of signs. This work belongs in the tradition of mechanical ballets but at the same time goes beyond it in making use of technical innovations that had featured in Intolleranza 1960 (self-propelled surfaces and projection of slides) as well as expedients from pre-war experimental theatre (scrims, short films, silhou­ettes, marionettes and dummies).

In Die Schachtel Evangelisti, as earlier Clementi, did without sung words, sharing the latter’s conviction that “vocalism and plot are bound up with one another” (Clementi 1964: 65). He chose to collaborate with an artist to avoid any dealings with a librettist, whether real or imaginary, and the consequences this entails: “The subject comes not from a poet but from a painter because I believe that the theatrical action in music can only survive as a fusion between the visual act and sound that is not the result of poetic texts” (Evangelisti 1964: 67). Nonetheless, far from disappearing, the word as a dimension of the audiovisual texture comes into play as both visual content (inscriptions or projections of newspaper cuttings) and acoustic content (in the form of a voice over, recording of a count down, report of the shares index). The use of words, albeit in ambiguous forms and removed from their customary contexts, makes it possible to circumscribe the work’s semantic domain and recognise references to the real world. In fact the title itself clarifies the composer’s intention: the ‘box’ is an allegory of a totally regulated world in which individuals are functional, automated components, endowed with “liberties” that are mere appearance (Marcuse 1964; Ferrari 1996 and 2000). Evangelisti does not give up the physical presence of people on stage, but rather than resorting to emblematic characters, as Nono did, he uses mimes as anonymous representatives of mass society. At the formal level they mir­ror the community of audio-spectators, who thus perceive themselves as part of the situation being represented.