Il grande rifiuto Ligna

The collective Ligna, based in Germany and founded in 1997 by the performing artists and radio activists Ole Frahm, Michael Hueners and Torsten Michaelson bring on stage a vision, a possible European History that never happened.

In August 1914, a congress of the Second Socialist International was supposed to take place in Vienna with the aim of reacting to the potential beginning of the Great War with a general strike, which should have desirably brought to collapse the infrastructures of involved countries and thus prevented the conflict burst. The congress and the strike never took place. The participants’ speeches and interventions were already written, the permit requests had been transmitted, but the war anticipated them and blocked its actualization.

In the year of the hundredth anniversary of WWI, Il grande rifiuto (original title “Die große Verweigerung”) investigates the individual and collective possibilities to refuse by re-enacting a story that never happened and whose end is unknown. The audience is invited to partake to a historical fiction: the congress of the Socialist International will take place in Santarcangelo, opening up a parallel universe, where the war as ineluctable destiny is called into question. Every one will deal with a series of “resistance exercises”, a training of individual and collective refusal poses and gestures.

Die große Verweigerung is the result of a series of artistic research residencies in Bolzano, Bologna, Genova and Reggio Emilia, that took place in April 2015.

In German and Italian

artistic coordination and production:
Elena Basteri; Emanuele Guidi; Elisa Ricci
administration:
Verena Rastner (ar/ge kunst, Bolzano/Bozen)
translation: Elena Basteri, Elisa Ricci

co-production: ar/ge kunst Bolzano / Bozen, Festival Transart Bolzano / Bozen, Santarcangelo 2015 Festival Internazionale del Teatro in Piazza; On Bologna; Fondazione Luzzati – Teatro della Tosse; Terni Festival Internazionale della creazione contemporanea (t.b.c.)
supported by: Goethe – Institut Genua; Goethe – Institut Mailand, Nationales Performance Netz (NPN) International Guest Performance Fund for Dance.

Residency program supported by Goethe – Institut e.V. Ligna
thanks to: Franco Berardi Bifo; Max Herold; Hans Heiss; Marco Marzi; Sandro Mezzadra; Cecilia Muraro; Hannes Obermair; Matteo Pasquinelli; Mirko Saltori; Sebastiano Tringali; Cecilia Troiano; Oswald Überegger.

Tour:

Festival Santarcangelo dei Teatri, 10 July 2015 (National Premiere)

Festival Transart and ar/ge kunst, 23 September 2015

Terni Festival Internazionale della creazione contemporanea, 20 September 2015

Teatro della Tosse, Genova, 26/27 November 2015

http://ligna.blogspot.it/