Towards Metropolis

Federico Tiezzi will study and recreate with participants the characters and dramatic situations of the novel and the film, providing a new and unprecedented space for interpretation and communication in relation to contemporary times. This Artifice is a workshop of dramaturgy and interpretation based on the novel Metropolis (1925) by Thea von Harbou and the eponymous, famous film by Fritz Lang. The novel is characterized by strong visionary qualities, both symbolic and fairy-tale-like, capable of seizing the most disruptive aspects of modern industrial society. The film, one of the great masterpieces of cinema, by reviving all these elements through powerful images, shows us a humanity enslaved to machines in a kind of Dantean inferno that seeks, through the recovery of Christian tradition, the original harmony between man and nature, between individual and society. The aim of the workshop is to work on the theatricality of the novel and the film, through a process of deconstruction and new synthesis of the thematic cores, for a future performance. That rewrites and interprets, in the light of the transformations of contemporary capitalism and its mythologies, the essential dramaturgical knots of a story that is both archetypal and Freudian. Metropolis will be rethought in this direction: a vertical city divided between elites and the underproletariat that becomes a lens to interrogate the present - from digital platforms to the ecological crisis, from the dissolution of work to the new production of imaginaries, from the new class struggle to the relationship between Body and Machine, up to the father-son relationship and the idea of the city as a pulsional unconscious that functions and is articulated exactly like a language. Another objective of the workshop is to study and recreate the main characters, providing a new and unprecedented space for interpretation and communication in relation to contemporary times. Characters on which the actor will subsequently be called to recreate and “rewrite” their own stage interpretation. The workshop will alternate moments of theoretical discussion, textual analysis and interpretative practice, in continuous exchange with the participants. And the possibility of connecting theatrical narration with other languages (cinema, dance, music and poetic writing) will also be analyzed. The objective is to understand how to rewrite a 'classic' like Metropolis for today's audience. To approach what is 'classic' as a place of intersections and crossings of languages and at the same time a vital space of contradictions, contaminations and contemporary polarities. Towards poetry in theatre, towards a Theatre of Poetry.