La versione di Misha (Eng.: Misha’s version) is a project of writing and interpretation of a “monologue for bears”. The text of the piece will be composed of theatrical passages which take on the concepts of autocracy and freedom, all hailed from several works and subsequently redacted together with abstracts of interviews with Mattei. The material, set up in such a way, wants to try and recount Mattei’s idea of natural resources management and of the developing relationship with the other industrialised countries. The text doesn’t have the pretence of theatrical correctness, but instead presents itself as a fragmented tale to be reunified through my interpretation, as an impromptu actor, and the spectators’, as they will try to pick up the pieces of what is happening in the scenes. An “attempted” interpretation of an “attempted” theatrical text will thus be improvised, one that calls back to the performance’s protagonist’s very own movements: Misha the bear.
Gifted by Krusciov to Mattei in 1958 to celebrate an oil deal, Misha has entertained audiences for thirty years and, similarly, the artists will read a text relaying the intentions of the founder of the village, while wearing a polygonal bear head, its maximum synthetis. The performer will move on stage in a forest made of television sets, found among the material left behind from the activity of the Colonia, on which images of interviews with Mattei, the only real interpretative tool of the perfomed text, will be shown.
Domenico Antonio Mancini, La versione di Misha part 1
installation, television sets and steel cables, August-September 2015
Colonia, AS Pavilion
Domenico Antonio Mancini, La versione di Misha part 1
work in progress
Colonia, M Pavilion
Photo: DC Archive, Giacomo De Donà, Adriano Zanni
