PPP Last inventory before liquidation

by ricci/forte, freely inspired by the works of Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini’s unfinished novel, Petrolio, from which this performance takes its inspiration, is a work littered with shifts and turns. Proceeding in fits and starts, it shuttles constantly back and forth as themes are dropped and subsequently reprised. It is a work that finds unity in the making – in the resentments comprised within its defiant and deeply troubled whole.

Adopting a similar non-linear approach and eschewing literary fiction, this piece by an international cast of performers will endeavor to reiterate the call for ethics demanded by Pasolini in the unfinished pages of Petrolio, a novel left without an ‘end’.

And it is precisely within this Michelangelesque unfinishedness that the heart of our current age lies, an age so lethargic, so troubled, yet nevertheless eager for a change of direction, a means of escape from a land devoid of ideals.  A comment on our times, this performance brings together disparate fragments from the rubble of our present and, through the shared experience and vision of Europe’s new generation, here represented by a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual cast, weaves them into a narrative whole, a commentary on the issues that move young Europeans, a people bogged down by the viscid quagmire of so-called ‘well-being’ currently propagated by a confused and disoriented State.
ricci/forte, a performing arts ensemble with an established interest in examining the metamorphosis of the Present, once again casts its visionary and critical eye over society, digging beneath appearances to unmask its hidden truths. And it is precisely the partial, truncated nature of Pasolini’s last prophetic work that is so appealing in this respect: the writing that shocks and stuns in its assault on rampant hedonism; the disorder that recounts a longing for life; the rallying cry for values that lies hidden beneath a crushed morality; the Kantian tension to be found in the individual details of a single body which is itself emblematic of the universal.

In this artistic undertaking by ricci/forte, the ensemble take up the mantle left by Pasolini to mount a vital challenge to the cultural dark ages of our times.