Fire Was the Cure - Teatro della Pergola

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury describes a dystopian future in which reading is banned, ever-on screens alienate people’s free time and the attempt to think causes physical malaise. Ironically, the fire department is no longer employed to put out fires but to burn books and, if necessary, their owners. The book came out about 70 years ago, in 1953, but is set in the future, that is the 2020s of the 21st century — meaning today. But you are in the 21st century and you are reading this text, so was Bradbury wrong? It depends on how we understand the dystopia: a prediction about the future that at some point is confirmed/disproved or an alarm about the present that keeps renewing itself? Il fuoco era la cura traverses and rereads Fahrenheit 451 freely, consuming it as one does a beloved book read a thousand times and dragged to a thousand places, getting it dirty, leaving it somewhere and then finding it again, while the cover fades, the binding loosens and the pages fill with notes, tickets, bookmarks and memories. Five performers retrace the novel’s story, identify with the characters, move horizontally mapping the cones of shadow, the things Bradbury doesn’t explain or tell us, creating parallel narrative lines, theoretical deviations, also building chronicles of an intermediate time between our present and an anti-cultural future in which stupification saves us from the burden of complex thought. If Bradbury were only a few years off, if Fahrenheit 451 really happened, what would we do?