''Continuum'' Luigi Coppola performance Milan 2016.

political social Performance time Spiral star tesla

In 1973, on the occasion of the XV Triennale International Exhibition of Milano, Alberto Burri inaugurates Teatro Continuo in the frame of the project Contatto Arte-Città curated by Giulio Macchi for Parco Sempione. Teatro Continuo is an architectural installation that functions as a open access stage and as a theatrical machine always ready for use, hosting a wide range of activities, from artistic acts to indipendent initiatives triggered by the civil society. The theatre is placed on an imaginary axis that, cutting the park, connects the Duomo with Corso Sempione and generates a telescope between the Filarete tower of the Castello Sforzesco and the Arco della Pace.

Offering itself to different forms of participation of citizens, Teatro Continuo communicates the idea of a theatre that envelopes and includes the urban space and which is characterized by a focus on new possibilities of dialogue with the audience.

This theatre is then “continuous” because of its inherent ability to react to the social and urban transformation and to incorporate the desire of a city and a society of representing themselves. At the same time, the theatre is discontinuous due to its demolition in 1989 and the fall into a latent state for the following 26 years, until it was brought back to the city in 2015 in occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Alberto Burri’s birth.

Taking as a starting point the very ambiguous and challenging nature of Teatro Continuo, Stage as a social platform focuses on the public, social and political intelligibility of performance. Teatro Continuo appears in fact as a fluid spot in the public space: an hybrid form which has abandoned its classical strictly theatrical posture, becoming a transitional and actually lived and livable place. Articulated around the idea that such a stage can function as a social catalyst, Stage as a social platform will activate Teatro Continuo with performative practices that progressively emerged from a participatory, nomadic and community-driven production phase.

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Through a process of production workshops organized by Viafarini with different social groups, the invited artists have performatively rearticulated the interesting on/off dynamic that qualifies Teatro Continuo as a continuous flow of different activities, both staged and non-staged: four different approaches to the stage, in the aim of proposing different form of collective occupations of the urban space.

The public action and installation ''Continuum'' conceived by Luigi Coppola will operate an imaginary and ritual reconnection with the spatial and temporal hole in which Teatro Continuo has disappeared from the history of Milano from 1989 to 2015. This absence becomes a potential element for re-examining the history and the events that occurred in Milan in that period, by imagining this “urban space of possibilities” – as Burri defined it – as a theatre of public, political and cultural actions.

Conductor: Luigi Coppola, Continuum (2016)
Project coordinator: Lucia Mazzi
Soundtrack: Nicola Ratti
Performer: Elena Adamou, Lenia Georgiou, Antonella Fittipaldi, Caterina Gobbi, Carlotta Mansi, Sofia Paggiaro, Lucia Palmero, Emilia Piz, Miriam Secco, Floida Skraqi, Simona Rinaldo, Erica Romano, Claudia Scarsella, Letizia Scarpello.
Narration: Alessio Baù, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Barbara Boiocchi, Daria Carmi, Ivan Carozzi, Ilaria Cuccagna, Giulia Ferrarese, Cristina Lorenzi, Lucia Palmero, Erica Romano, Giacomo Zani.
Photography: Ilaria Cuccagna

Rehersals and preparations for the performance at Fabbrica del Vapore.

The spiral shape is a symbol of time and the star is created out of Teslas mathematical calculations in relation to it. During the performance we had to move always in reference to this shape.

Preparation of the materials that will be on scene. Smashing the ashes and the coal into fine dust. The idea was that of using charred natural materials that are reminiscent of the deterioration and destruction.