Questions of style - Kinder Traum Seminar
Kinder Dream Seminar
(A Seminar on Children's Dreams)
A dedicated thought-word to the Collective Memory of the Holocaust
by Enzo Moscato
scenic images by Mimmo Paladino
with Cristina Donadio, Vincenza Modica, Giuseppe Affinito
and the little Isabella Mosca Lamounier
organized by Claudio Affinito
stage set-up, lights, and projections by Simone Picardi, Fabio Calvetti, and Sebastiano Cautiero
production by Enzo Moscato Theater Company/House of Contemporary
duration 50 minutes
Kinder Dream Seminar ('Seminar on children's dreams' or also 'Seminar on children in dreams': the correct interpretation of the German title is deliberately left ambiguous, just as ambiguous as it is left by Jung, to whom the show's title is 'stolen') is a collection of different voices (Janusz Korczak, Tadeusz Kantor, Etty Hillesum, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Gitta Sereny, Tzvetan Todorov, Mary Berg, Bruno Bettelheim, Robert Antelme, Edith Stein, Paul Celan, Marina Tsvetaeva) captured within the most devastating collective tragedy that the history of humanity can clothe itself in: the Holocaust.
The extermination of races and political opponents to the insane establishment of the Nazi regime, first in Germany and then in much of Europe, around the middle of the last century. But it is not a historical-chronological reworking of those events, nor could it be, since the chosen place for the mnemonic-emotional revivification of them is not a book or a documentary transcription, but the Theater, the seat par excellence not of the domains of fact or reality, but of the symbolic and the imaginary, and, in fact, symbolic, imaginary, evocative, elusive, elliptical - we are quoting, as you can see, all the possible forms in which the Poetic is given - is the dimension in which the author of the representation wants to depict those grim events, not so that history and its sad concrete aftermaths are devalued, escaped, denied, or erased, but, on the contrary, to further strengthen - and not in a banally contingent way but in a trans-temporal and trans-subjective sense - their inescapable impact on our daily lives.
