Sardinia. It is from here that a new path, a stimulating process, an other artistic way, meticulous, wise and well oiled since the beginning, between movement and sound, choreography and technology, mathematical numbers and improvisations, was created.
A new system Sistema has already been created, in order to be represented and improved, a new research well structured and harmonious, evident from the first show, Prometeo, o viaggio nel regno del non ritorno (Prometeo, or travel in the reign of the not coming back) , 2001, developed in collaboration with The Physics Department of Cagliari. They have achieved then different works ranging from radiodrama such as Euuxtacchio, freely inspired by Ted Hughes’ poems and Leonard Baskin’s drawings, to the visual-sound installations such as Euxxta-chio and the feature film Et Abyssum , inspired to the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci.
Alessandro Carboni and Danilo Casti are young artists who are already well integrated and known within the “niche” of contemporary theatre- of reserach and prestige- that kind of theatre more unstable, more redundant and fascinating than ever, expressive and deep in physiology, creative and aesthetic for necessity. They are OOFF.OURO , word born from the contraction of the word Officina Ouroboros , leading group of the new performative generation, who, from Assemini have crossed London and the countries of the East of Europe, arriving, thanks to their dramaturgic vocation, up to the South of India in order to prepare meticulously their last work, the Project AB.Q. Looking for the origin of the zero. Between maths and dance, in collaboration with the University Central Saint Martin’s of London and the University of Calicut – School of Drama Aranattukara of Thrissu r. It is a work of intensive research which will be presented on the 14 th of September in Forlì on the occasion of the Crisalide Festival 2006 . You can’t miss that occasion in order to take part in a sort of modern happening, to understand how the performative alphabet of the sign, space and sound -according to well ordered computations- can be reinvented, without changing radically the craddle of culture, on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.
 |
.
OOFF.OURO focus all their artistic practices on the Trilith System , a sort of innovative methodological platform. This System is an organism which was born, four years ago more or less, from the vehement necessity to know the world, to raise the walls where fencing yourself and on which exploring and addressing the higher quantity of objects and facts which follow one another fortuitously within the world. The world is an agglomeration of places on which entities and objects rest, whose connection and combination in the passing of time, determines events, that is to say facts.
Each fact must expect the presence of objects because objects are the structure of facts and facts are the structure of the world. The intention of developping a method of work raising a number of questions on the function and role of the process, during the building of the work, allows us to consider the method as an entity which is paradoxally unstable. Unstable in the meaning of the continous loss of our certainties up to their cancellation, with the contradistinction of the rule. The process in this case is considered as the work itself. The process becomes the chance of building the language, and consequently the work itself -considered as an organic entity, unstable and in constant mutation, in constant ageing and regeneration during the course of time- is under discussion.
 |
.
The constant auto-reference of the System, even through the representation of itself, becomes the modality of self verification of our doing, of our work process, which, as a mutant entity, creates new paths and new work processes. This idea of constant instability becomes fractal and damages not only the work, since pseudo-finished object, but the practice of OOFF.OURO too. Through three different stages, the System completes a process of catalogation, combination and representation of itself. Auto-generative, auto-referential, auto-logical and recursive, the System representing itself becomes a closed entity. A closed system, metaphor of the world. World mirror, the System has created a methological structure extremely elaborated and precise. It has elaborated a language; it has created an uprooted world. Despite this, its complete separation allows us to raise new outposts to explore the world.
ABQ – Mechanical extensions in four arithmetic operations is the first survey arisen out of the results of the research carried out by the University of Calicut ofThrissur in the South of India some months ago. It derives from the relation between dance-music-space-number and improvisation, raising different and deep questions on the relation between the use of maths and the creative-methodological processes of representation. It develops not for spiritual or religious interests but for the numerical ones, number as an entity, as a grammatical unity; Exhaustion-Variation-Combination will be three research paths which will lay the study basis for buiding of a new choreography.
 |
.
“The idea was exactly to verify my practice, without fearing the distance – Alessandro Carboni explains us scrupulously – in another geographical and social context such as the Indian’s one. I have left from London, Europe, and the West, considering Samuel Beckett, and the centenary of his birth, as an important moment of reflection on the status of the Western contemporaneous theatre, that is to say on its function. This exigence derived above all from considering this recurrence as an hypothetic degree zero of representation, in which the zero, considered as the”non-number”, a nothing, becomes a physic entity, the fundamental pillar on which the whole project revolves around. I tried to pass through Beckett after having observed some choreographical aspects in his works, especially the use of number as a pure entity, as a grammatical unity. In fact, I couldn’t help starting from Quad, four-dancer choreography.
In this work, the dancers cross the diagonals of the square stage avoiding endlessly the centre of it, such as if it was a dangerous zone, forbidden. The center of the stage becomes the degree zero, as an empty spatial object, set at zero from any movement. Becket studies maths, but he uses the number advancing in the opposite direction, describing just its power. He started focusing on the binary numeration system, the Gray Code used above all for mechanical systems for command. Besides, he introduces the idea of a closed system through precise rules of entry and exit of dancers, using the numerical sequence of the Grey Code as pure instruction. Beckett cleans up the movement making of it a pure function. Dance turns into a pure movement of deambulation, the walk. [ ] Beckett elaborates an essential “instruction choreography” for dancers in which action, time and space are precisely computed.
It seemed to be in front of the first experiments of computation machines, such as the Machine of Differences or the project of the Analytic Machine by Charles Babbage or the genius Alan Turing who, in 1936, invented the concept of the Abstract Machine which, so far, is at the basis of the computability theory. Beckett’s Quad was not only a pretext for opening new passages on which converge different concepts about the use of maths and the number within dance and choreography, but it becomes the occasion for testing its potentialities in other territorial contexts, far from the West. The barycentre of my research couldn’t help moving Eastwards. I wanted to restart from zero, following its geographical shiftnig from East towards West, restart from the origin of the zero, but on its opposite direction, from Europe towards India .”
 |
.
The necessity to create a new and exact position , to be at last within space and identifying yourself in it not just partially and frontally, but according to trajectories created by the body, the so-called Passage of Status, the necessity of finding a sort of complete balance to make the Work become the Process, shifting your focus continuously. The necessity to develop actions in real time, focusing and transferring the catalogued elements to the first stage of the trilith system, Tabula, then combined and subjected to the pressure of space and to the infinite flow of time instants, as it happens in reality. Necessity of an action born in the exact instant in which it dies, he next instant which borns at once, riding Time, without expecting nothing but the Instant. Necessity of combinations of Binary, Ternary and Quaternary Class as it happens in the three acts staged in Europe: Genesis: “The vision of the world through an instant”; Epigenesis: “…Or the paradox of the system”; and Anagenesis: “Etimo” which will be staged on the occasion of the second lap of the review IPERCORPO in Forlì on next 28th and 29 th of October.
Those are the necessities of OOFF.OURO, or more precisely, the essential aesthetic reasons which move or push their work towards an absolute and original methodology, stratified in the path and specific in the creative act. The immediacy makes its way through the use of screens and projections on the stage, of corporeal techniques and rhytmic professional procedures, through expressive practices codified and dematerialized in their being hic et nunc. We are experiencing a renewal of the practices of the body and of the vision of the theatre, remembering Régis Debray who not long ago have said ” any art, any image are immutable in their dignity ” and that each epoch has its aisthesis, its own collective sensoriality.