| HYMN TO THE LIGTH...FROM MEDITERRANEAN |

2007

...Et à l’aurore,
armès d’une ardente patience,
nous entrerons aux splendides villes”...

Une Saison en Enfer A. Rimbaud

An European, multilingual stage performance with music as unifying element, music in harmony with the sense, to positively reaffirm THE BEST PRINCIPLES that over generations our Civilization has developed.
Rendered ineffective by’ profits’ societies, they need to be stated again, rightly thanks to their ‘usefulness’, for the recovery of a balance in a blind, unnatural, foolish, and essentially BAD PROCEEDING.
Old civilization of rulers and ruled, we have unfolded an acute consciousness, and against those who spread blindness and misery, we send out, “deep and loud”, a BEAUTIFUL HYMN for FREEDOM, WHICH DOES NOT KILL!
It claims LOVE WITH RESPECT FOR ANY FORM OF LIFE and FREE EXPRESSION OF THE SELF for all creatures generated here on Earth, and by the Sun and the Light kept alive!
It professes BEAUTY, leading to harmony and truth, the essential prerequisites for a rapid advance in civilization and primary source of individual and collective expression.
It asserts the value of DREAMS, of the FLIGHT OF IMAGINATION, of looking up at the sky and over the sea, beyond our limits as individual and circumstance, because much more is within us, and from Nature and from her wonderful balance of strength and coherence, re-learn the Way.
Finally it professes the pleasure of JOYFUL LIVING, of PLAYING TOGETHER, which all of us frees and unites, without deep-rooted prejudices and barriers from race, culture, religious belief and media suggestions.
A reference code, a code of communication, a solid NEW EPOS where to identify and reunite, we contemporaries...
TRADITION DOES NOT MISS. It is just denigrated and made unfruitful by those who have never learned the lesson, they DO NOT SEE.
Historicity and universality are united in what is our cultural tradition, and if there is a reason in history, it is reflected in the cultural tradition, if a progress, a progress of this (Hegel).

...Along the shores of the Mediterranean passed the Silk Road. The routes of salt and spices, of oils and perfumes, of amber and ornaments, met... wisdom and knowledge, art and science. The Hellenic stores were at once markets and embassies. Power and civilization diffused along the Roman roads The Prophets and the Religions have come from Asia.
Europe was conceived on the Mediterranean.

"Mediterranean" Predrag Matvejevic

Hymn to the Light: A tribute to the great visionaries

To Hans G. Gadamer, Plato and Leonardo da Vinci, William Blake, Beethoven and F. Nietzsche, Dante Alighieri, A. Rimbaud and Baudelaire, Leibniz and Kant, and Yeats, Hesse, Khalil Gibran and Ben Jelloun, Picasso and John Lennon, Peter Gabriel and Albert Einstein and Gandhi and Christ, and poets, and artists and philosophers and to all those who have ‘shown the way’ to a better path, that will make our lives conscious and worth living.

Light is the symbol of knowledge, of truth as drawing the veil from shades of night, from darkness, from a state of living death for conscience, it means human clarity of mind which gives praise to the source of life, THE SUN.
From Mesopotamia to Egypt, to Phoenicia, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Arab secular staying in many sites of Europe, to the widespreading of the best ideas and values of our ancient civilization through the great revealed religions (chronologically Judaism, Christianity, Islam, all branches of the same tree), to the sharing of scientific and philosophical thought on a broad scale, our cultures belong each other, for centuries they have faced, confronted and sometimes... fully assimilated, thanks particularly to the sea, our Mediterranean... by now Azure Shrine for those who never reached the right side and the hope for a better future.
Our song will start from there and honour their memory.

 

Actually an Enlightenment is the grasping of something that is given in advance... is to get knowledge as a flash of recollection that leaves us spellbound, makes us pause to decipher, and yet we all agree with (H.G.Gadamer).
An Enlightenment is the embodiment of an idea, the truth that directs, the divine sparkling... Every culture has developed his own Metaphysics of Light.
This is the foundation of inventiveness, not the man as such (A. Coomoraswamy).
Love for Beauty and for Good are not invented, but they awaken us to the true meaning of the Being, an Enlightenment indeed, not at all comparable to the coward calculation designed to keep alive our little self, but an emerging property of matter we are composed of, which harmoniously relating, cyclically produce an higher quality of beings.
The sense of evolution in our life rests upon harmonious relations, in greek ‘logos’, of which love is the highest moment. (V. Mancuso).

The stage proposal

It aims to restore Theatre to its original value and purpose: THE PLACE OF VISION, of the wonderful (from Sanskrit thau = dau –diu –div = to shine, to brighten, cf. gr. theà = to watch up with wonder what shines or arises in heaven, the same etymology as theòs, lat. deus, but also dies, Engl. day = sunlight), and it is... THE PLACE OF THE SHARED RITUAL..
"The Theatre has a big task today," says Gadamer, "more spiritual than in the periods in which the scene was a camera obscura, and he hopes that today's humanity, on which is poured a constant stream of stimuli and barely manages to avoid passivity, will be able to rise above all in the sublime that belongs to the moment of festivity. The joyful living, the spirit of festivity, in a rhythmic and mystic ritual, for a state of a superior awareness and sharing.
Universal ideas, the great myths of humanity are almost all monotonously much alike in their basic characteristics, they mean not only the common possession of ideas, but also the collective origin of them.
The HEART is very similar in the world indeed, and our biology the most convincing universal.

Different rhythms and sounds, but remarkably alike in energy, signs and meanings, wisdom and naturalness (apollonian as well as dionysian aspects together), without hesitation in giving space to sensory impressions, whether by human voice, music and body in the 'so longed’ reunion of performing arts: acting, singing, dance...
Music... to which all they tend... and that it all includes.