Der Prozess

In the dark of sleep, a door opens, exits a women dressed with sheets of paper, symbolising the fate and the cause that will rage against the protagonist.

This is the incipit of DER PROZESS, a ballet by the choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti, who made his debut in March 2015 with the company of the Hannover’s Staatsoper. Freely taken from the homonymous literary masterpiece of Franz Kafka, the choreography reproduces the stories of Josef K., who wakes up on his 30th birthday and finds besides him three police men, who want to arrest him for reasons that he doesn’t understand. The disoriented and incredulous protagonist will progressively be carried into a judicial whirl, that will carry him to loose himself.

The further movie, made by Orson Welles in 1962, has a decisive role on the imaginary of Bigonzetti and it is recalled by the video-set design of OOOPStudio, trough the strength and drama of the black and white of the movie. The dancers, winded by a worried and crazed atmosphere of dark and light, stage the anguishes of every single character in a narration that looks like being a tragic nightmare,metaphor of the man, who is trashed by rules, which he doesn’t understand and he can’t rebel against. Lights, wisely designed by Carlo Cerri, continuously act in synergy with the video set design,shooting the rational cuts, the lines and geometries, creating spaces by graphic signs, which actually are no-spaces in alternation with places recalled by projections. OOOPStudio creates for DER PROZESS seven different scenes, that follow K. in his ‘descensus ad inferos’, seven evocative and oneiric places, but in the same time are strongly linked with the reality and strictly modeled on the stage because they are exactly projected with and on it. This is why the gallery behind the stage-ceiling, which are reserved to the technical operators, are leaved in view, and this is why the flats have prospective projections to the bottom and to sides to complete the creation of the scene, that has the purpose of giving a three-dimensional perception of the setting. The sense of trapping is given by the video projections through a repeated graphic use of grid and serial geometries. The alienation of the modern man as well is carried on stage by dark outlines of men bent on working, repetitive and depersonalized as the great setting that hosts them. The repetition in the architectural spaces occurs as the symbol of the perpetration of the events. The eternal return appears in the gratings of the working areas and in the extremely smart settings, as the lawyer office, where the motifs of the arches repeat in an infinite game of Chinese boxes or as the archive where huge piles of paper fell to the ground, disclosing the space/prison that imprisons the protagonist. In the nursery room the spiral-tower alludes to the repetition of the events in the story, where Mr. K., who is symbolically with no name, becomes the prototype of what happens to the the others in the story. After crossing all these situations the protagonist falls into chaos and into disorientation. He has been in touch with the reality to some extent, and now the end is coming, so he falls into the prospective foggy infinity of a surreal wood/mirror, where he becomes mad. Madness shows itself at its peak in the final scene, where the color splits black and white. Victim of an anonymous power, that defines itself in wide hierarchies, where no real judgment emerges from, K. goes out his unhappy destiny and the “system” can see the execution through the end.