The Spread of the Head Louse

Pasolini was the first by a long margin to identify the anthropological transformation of the Italian people, a transformation now fully complete.
In this new work, ricci/forte tune into Pasolini’s prescient vision, creating an intimate, close-range performance for a small group of spectators in search of an antidote to, and means of resisting, the barbarism in which our society is immersed.

Pasolini was the first by a long margin to identify the anthropological transformation of the Italian people, a transformation now fully complete.
In this new work, ricci/forte tune into Pasolini’s prescient vision, creating an intimate, close-range performance for a small group of spectators in search of an antidote to, and means of resisting, the barbarism in which our society is immersed.

The stage setting, explain ricci/forte, is "A bar, an anteroom of Hell, a ‘non-place’, a prism through which the lucid image of a degraded society is reflected and deflected and its antidote, the means necessary to resist it and not raise the white flag of defeat, are brought into focus: the weapons of human poetry with which to combat the consumerist economy now dominating society.

At heart, the world of pinball machines and jukeboxes, aperitifs and catchy summer hits into which society has withdrawn is nothing but a cage, designed to entrap and ensnare, a cage designed to a precise political agenda. Conservatism deftly delineates its perimeters: school, television, the soft, soothing words of the daily papers and dulcet tones of primetime TV news, all reveal a political schema based on the idea of bombing society with ‘Aperol’ missiles, mollifying cocktails that level a country downwards, eventually bringing it to its knees.

In the bars of our suburbs today one breathes the air of Italy past and present: the Italy of terrorist plots and massacres; the Italy of economic boom, the Italy of economic crisis – bombs, development and insecurity, a triple boom.

The urban proletariat looks on with indifference, its historical agency drained away, like rain down a manhole, leaving in its wake, along with the fading notes of a jukebox hit, the extinguished sparks of revolution and a class vanquished without murmur”.
ricci/forte

www.ricciforte.com

also read Ricci/Forte portrait by Irina Worf, interviewing Rita Maffei: Ricci/Forte appeal directly to people's hearts