Like a reporter from another planet, or from the future, who has come to collect scraps of European civilisation in the most contradictory of its centuries, Patrik Ourednik looks back at the twentieth century with Europeana, offhandedly passing from the use of gas in the trenches during the Great War to the invention of the bra, from the Normandy landings to the appearance of the refrigerator and the hair-drier. He thus creates the story of our recent past, terrible yet fun, incredible and simple, where exceptionality and frivolity all find a place.
Conversing with the accordion played by the Slovenian Marko Hatlak, Lino Guanciale transforms Ourednik’s flood of events and stories into a sentence that spans the play, leaping suddenly from tragedy to farce and vice versa.
“There are things that all happened at the same time – stresses Guanciale – here are leaps back and forth in time, throughout the century, which is thus retraced various times, re-examining the same years from different points of view. Yet this incessant movement is part of a single story; as with a sentence, one passes from the first to the last word, drawing in various points of digression; with the result that in the end, Europeana presents a long and diachronic excursus of the last century. It is in this complex and syncopated linguistic construction that an actor finds the basis of their action and the potential to stage a rich dialogue between acting and music”.