Alice

Staged by Stuttgart-based Gauthier Dance, Alice plays with that thin thread that binds reality and imagination, fiction and truth. Creating the video scenes for the show debuted last June 25 at Teatherhaus, we have interpreted the suggestions of the choreography created by Mauro Bigonzetti, integrating and enriching its atmosphere, talking out the power of gestures, following the central idea. This is the reason why the settings follow one another in and out of gilded frames, as different rooms represented in the paintings hanged on the wall of the narrator, an intriguing Lewis Carroll played by Eric Gauthier. These places suddenly come alive, drawing us into the different scenes of the show, leaded by the choreography.

With our art work we want to build a space that could extend the stage as well as represent feelings and emotions. Alice’s world is prolix, a world that we can not know and we must therefore learn to feel the same emotions of the two different Alice. We have cared about all the details of the sets, studying and being inspired by Gothic architecture represented by Piranesi, by Escher’s places without dimension and by European Baroque art that we have found in many large halls of the 700thcentury. We have combined our artistic sensitivity to our technical knowledge: all the videos were realised by 3D reconstructions of the environments and of the animation of the events in which they occur. Here then we find the Room of the Library at the beginning of the show, recollection of a place that Alice has already known but that is simply pencilled as it is in the stylization of her memories. Books flying as thoughts and libraries crumbling mark the complete detachment from the real world to finally enter in Wonderland. It is a world where rationality is never set aside entirely, slowly causing its decline and its destruction. None of what we see is really real. It is only when the water floods the Presentations’ Room that absurd takes hold at the expense of realistic. Rooms become symbols, metaphors, and they emphasize the close link between choreography and its messages. The vault of a cathedral looks like a spider’s web in which the Queen weaves her own judgments; a stairway in distorted perspective makes it look difficult every situation when seen from the wrong point of view and yet the Queen’s gold realm, magnificent at first glance but that soon begins to crack and to reveal all its hidden flaws. Several clues throughout the show help us to understand how the boundary between true and false, between dreams and disenchantment, is weak and confused. Signs of madness appear hidden in the sceneries as small animals that inhabit Carroll’s imagination. Distorted perspectives and counterfeit colours lead to a perception that becomes almost deceit. Only in the second half of the show all turns out to be fiction. The curtain falls on the world of Wonderland and the rooms are even more ambiguous and frightening: we enter a world in the world, the Labyrinth as a metaphor of our mind. But the one between true and false, between reality and imagination is a dialogue, an exchange. Everything is intertwined. Twins are linked by a braid and so are the roots of the two trees that we have created as a backdrop for this scene. They do not ever tear off at all, even when the Queen divides the braided hair of the two dancers/twins. Not even the two different Alice will separate entirely: a formation fiction the one of “Alice in Wonderland” which ends with her own exit from the land of imagination for going into adulthood with her creator. Despite the age, she will never forget her own Wonderland’s alter ego. The final scene proposes again the initial Room of the Library: the return to reality is confused by the presence of the frame and the lack of central library, though. The world of Wonderland has left its mark in the real world indeed.