The construction of a show, the interweaving of processes, languages and relationships, was the focus of a project of collaboration between the students of the Accademia Teatro alla Scala and the Piccolo Scuola di Teatro.

Professionals and new creative communities worked together to study the various ways of “making theatre”, and on the methods used to record what is currently documented and preserved.

15 students from the Photo, Video and New Media course at the Accademia Teatro alla Scala followed the students of the Piccolo Scuola di Teatro to document the various stages in the preparation of the show for the end of the second year (Corso “Claudia Giannotti”), the play I pretendenti by Jean-Luc Lagarce, directed by Carmelo Rifici. Coordinated by Filippo Toppi, photography and video was handled by the students: Fabio Benato, Giulia Berruti, Gaia Capone, Vincenza Coppolecchia, Giorgia Di Lonardo, Lorenzo Gorini, Costantino Lodolo D’Oria, Mateo King, Greta Mianiti, Andrea Pella, Elia Pisani, Monica Ricci, Elisa Todeschini, Roberto Viccaro, Aliaksei Zuyeu

The play presented a number of challenges in terms of visual narrative; the story is based on a meeting of the members of a provincial directorate called for the handing over of power from the incumbent director to a new figure. The aspect of relations is central to the work, despite the suffocating repetitiveness of ceremony: the expectations of change are shattered in a claustrophobic self-replicating cycle. Actions are reduced to repetitions of exhausted dynamics, and to the presenting of forced and cruelly comical expressions.

The photographers and video-makers dove into this script of gestures and actions, documenting, day after day, the tiring process of embodying the characters; the relations between actors, students and teachers were documented within the complexity of a fluid space, in the breaking down of the boundaries between off-stage and on-stage. The images express the combination of promotional, documentary and narrative goals, revealing a rich variety of interpretations and points of view.

The project permitted the documentation of the production and the selection of images during the various stages of the creative process; this provided contemporary insight into the analysed processes regarding the Luigi Ciminaghi Archive. The concept of preservation thus examines new questions related to formats, metadata and preservation methods, as well as the traceability of the various paths taken by images in the fluid dimension of digital.