June 2023
Freshly back from Naples (my first time there; what a bonkers place!), where I was bowled over by the fun, quality and generosity of this year’s participants in Altofest. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get to do a gig or a project that’s really special, and that makes the joy, excitement and satisfaction of amateur making (I mean this in the proper sense, from the latin ‘amare’, to love) bubble up and inspire again.
Altofest, organised by the Teatringestazione team, has a deceptively simple premise: solicit open submissions from performers around the world, make a selection based not on an explicit theme, but rather on subtle resonances between works, and embed the invited artists in the city itself by placing them in the homes of a network of Naples’ citizens, encouraging them to adapt the proposed works to respond to, fit in with, or otherwise incorporate the hosting homes–or indeed their hosts–into the performance.
Concretely, this meant taking the lockdown piece You Are The Mole–eerily, YATM premiered in 2021 to a physical audience of zero, instead performed to a camera crew for streaming at a later date–and blowing new life into it. The result was an fun, off-kilter duet performed four times on the trot with my gracious host, the profoundly thoughtful and incisive Pina Lanna, in her living room, a space filled with Italian translations of the great works of sociology and literature from 20th century, and packed each run with a motley crew of locals and international visitors to the festival. My favourite rendition was the second one: everything clicked, Pina knocked it out of the park, and the piece still felt fresh and new, and the audience seemed to get a kick out of it. It was a special treat to finally do the piece in front of a fleshy, present audience, something that I had forgotten hadn’t yet taken place. Repeat performances are always a great way to get to know a piece and what does and doesn’t work in it; the laughs in this one came in some very unexpected places, and more frequently than I thought they would. Here’s a bit of ambient viddy from the festival filmed and edited by the lovely Giuseppe Valentino that gives a good sense of the heat and intensity behind the scenes (after a slow first week of settling in, making adaptations, and rehearsing, the four days of performances were very full-on, so forgive the bearded punter half-snoozing at the 7-second mark), with some of that second day performance cut in. I recommend checking out all of the artists at the festival; it was an astonishing mix of folks and ideas and hosted some genius performances.
So the art was cool, yes, but the real highlight of the festival for me was the social side of things; spending time with and getting to know actual residents of Naples, learning about the fabric of the city first-hand, and really living there as something of an insider was incredible. If you’re reading this as somebody who makes performances, I can’t urge you enthusiastically enough to submit for a future edition of the festival. If the point of all of this stuff is to make meaningful things happen with and through others, and for audiences and performers to draw sustenance from, then Altofest has it absolutely nailed. This wasn’t just a couple of fun weeks hanging out and playing shows in a busy, sweaty city, but a possibly life-changing thing. It will be a long time before the sights, sounds and smells of these four shows, in their four-hands form with Pina, fade from memory.
Thanks to Anna and Giovanni T, all of their behind-the-scenes collaborators (you know who you are), and all the performers and audiences. Get in. Next stop for the mole: the Oslo Fringe in September. See you there?
Before I sign off on this one, we need to talk about partybag.
joesna.pe 