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Boomers
January 18, 2024, 6 pm | Sala Riccardi – Donizetti Theatre
About BOOMERS
Meeting with Marco Paolini and company
Boomers is a theatrical-cybernetic ballad, a new album of short stories where the collective memory of a generation is transformed into virtual reality video-game scenarios “forbidden to unaccompanied minors under 48” within which Nicola – alter ego/avatar of Marco Paolini – returns young again to his place of refuge, the infamous bar of the Jole, in order to recall and relive adventures, first loves, political feuds and a kaleidoscope of 50 years of Italian history mixed up in bulk by an algorithm still at an experimental stage.
As if it were a modern 8-bit fresco of a new world under construction, one finds oneself watching the scene unfold under a motorway bridge pylon, which goes from one opening to another without any maintenance. Underneath the bridge is the centre of the world, Jole's bar, the mistress of stories and relationships between Nicola, the regulars and lunatics of the square. A shining queen for that fauna of shambling humanity that in the dark times in which it lives finds, even in the dimest light, a north star to lean on, to alleviate its loneliness, at least until the next day.
Boomers is also the story of an interrupted dialogue between generations, a frayed fathers and sons relationship that is attempted to be reestablished in the reality reconstructed in a virtual world. A personal ideal paradise made up of memories and historical events that in their grafting together, without any truthful chronological order, create a narrative Frankenstein that comes alive thanks to the narratives-recounts of the game experiences that Nicola carries out in this universe created by his son, a virtual reality programmer for an international video game company.
The new technologies challenge the transmission of experience and the maieutic function of memory. Memory in Boomers becomes an experience of “putting into play” and poses a challenge to the reality of our time: is it true and real; what is experienced or what is told? And are we a system of seemingly single data or a deeper system of complex links?
The performance stems from the experience of an author who has based an important part of his work on memory and today questions what are the possible responses of the theatre (a place of fiction and representation by vocation) to a world in which virtual and real experiences are increasingly mixed without clear degrees of separation. Music plays a very important role, with a small ensemble of musicians led by Patrizia Laquidara, one of the most intense and lyrical voices of “leggera” music, an elusive, multifaceted and brilliant figure of contemporary auteur music.
On stage, Laquidara takes on the guise of Jole, a mythical character from the Albums, a former partisan, a former prostitute, she ran and still runs the bar-center-of-the-world around which all the stories unfold.
Marco Paolini, narrator, gives body and voice to the chorus of characters in the stories of Jole's bar. In an established process in the creation of his shows, Marco Paolini took the first steps in this creation in the summer of 2022. Now, after filtering its words and notes, he faces a new production path that will see an initial production for the summer in a more concert form and a winter production for the prose stages.
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