Il Capitale

Funded in 2015 by Nicola Borghesi, Enrico Baraldi and Paola Aiello, Kepler-452’s activity focuses on two main axes. On the one hand, the urgency of targeting a specific audience aged between 20 and 30 through shows, festivals, exhibitions and workshops. On the other hand, the Company intends to investigate and stage the lives of non-professionals (otherwise called “world-actors”) by glorifying their identities.
Il Capitale (Das Kapital) is an investigation into the relationship between workplaces and workers: factories and redundant workers, agricultural crops and labourers, riders in large cities and many other types of workers.
Accomplices of this new work are the 1263 pages of Das Kapital, Karl Marx’s manifesto: “A work without which our daily life would probably be very different”, say Kepler-452.
For the artistic collective, it seems that the time has come to face the reinterpretation of Marx’s thought; his theories have conditioned generations of readers and academics, and are a dialectical source of inspiration still alive today.
The goal is to re-read Das Kapital by putting it in dialogue with today’s political mechanisms; to bring out the relationship between Marx’s words and reality by giving space to the intimate dimension of the voices met in the research.

IL CAPITALE BOOKLET

Extracts from press review

AKWEB.DE – Lucia Steinwender – April 2024
(…) A beautiful, strong piece about solidarity could now be seen on stage.

SIPARIO.IT – Roberto Canavesi – 18/02/2024
The Capital of Kepler-452 becomes an unsettling interrogation and questioning of the specific function of art. (…) A provocative question that accompanies the ninety-minute viewing, needless to say, greeted with convinced and deserved applause: (…) a participatory and shared narration that brings with it the ‘bitter awareness of the actual inability (or perhaps lack of will) to commit everyone towards the definition of an architecture different from the capitalist one, including artists and the world of theatre.

INTERNAZIONALE – Annalisa Camilli – 02/02/2024
The way in which Kepler-452 have decided to stage personal stories and to integrate the language of narrative theatre with video inserts and the use of scenic objects that allow the spectator to enter the factory and understand the working mechanisms is original.

GAGARIN – Tommaso Chimenti – 25/01/2024
Kepler’s Il Capitale is a great life lesson. Because it does not only talk about work and our imploded and failed contemporary world, it does not only talk about collapsed and gasping capitalism, but it talks about western life. (…)
But above all, it speaks of time, of time that we believe is unlimited and that instead, at a certain point, runs out.

GAZZETTA DI MODENA – Andrea Marcheselli – 12/12/2023
On the other hand, there is absolutely no lack of pathos that is generated and forces the spectator to enter into emotional contact with men and women fighting for questions of dignity, of principle, ideological even before practical ones (…) Kepler-452, on the other hand, deserves praise for a new show that once again stages a burning topical issue, declaring its universal value.

RTBF.BE – Diane Delangre – 6/06/2023
Il Capitale.Un libro che ancora non abbiamo letto shines with a thousand lights. (…) Behind this staging which is not really one, hides an unusual approach which deserves all your attention.

LE SOIR.BE – Catherine Makereel – 1/06/2023
Removed, sincere, funny, the show asks these questions and shows men and women who have found themselves companions of struggle. (…) Greeting the audience at the end of the play, raised fist or hand on the heart, they don’t do theatre, they move their struggle to the stage, as an echo for other workers in revolt.

TEATRO E CRITICA – Andrea Zangari – 10/11/2022
Il Capitale is not a pietistic report on the misfortune of others, but an apostrophe addressed to our conscience right from that subtitle: A book we haven’t read yet, even if we pretend, we did, in fact. The conscience evoked here is that of the individual, but also that of a social block.

IL SOLE 24 ORE – Maddalena Giovannelli – 22/10/2023
Il Capitale reminds us how it is now impossible to talk about struggles and rights except from a complex and intersectional perspective.

IL FATTO QUOTIDIANO – Davide Turrini – 22/10/2022
And if for Kepler 452 in the end Das Kapital is a “show about time, about who owns it, sells it, buys it, frees it”, the spectator, after an hour and forty minutes of show, has to come up against the murderous inevitability of Capital with a continuously updated reflection on “what we are willing to give up” so that all this martyrdom of lives and work never happens again”.

DOPPIOZERO – Rossella Menna – 21/10/2022
A work that goes beyond the initial theme and pedagogical pitfalls, full of tensions, emotions, nuances, and perspectives of meaning. (…) The show ended with a very exciting standing ovation from the audience, a sort of spontaneous promise to continue the fight together.

IL MANIFESTO – Gianfranco Capitta – 15/10/2022
The strong element, even in the exchange with the ‘normal’ public, lies in the deepening of ideas, rights, behavioural models. A beautiful and profitable experience for every spectator who will come across it. 

CONTROSCENA – Enrico Fiore – 12/10/2022
Dramaturgy gives the idea of community as best it could not have been done. And no less is the effectiveness with which it reveals our contradictions, even in the substantial adherence to Marxist thought.

HUFFPOST ITALIA – Mario De Santis – 12/10/2022
A wonderful experience that we hope to be able to see again elsewhere with its force of truth, the ethical attitude, without the rhetoric, the curious gaze, the body and the persons of the workers as evidence of lives as well as work.

Il Capitale – trailer.mp4 from Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione on Vimeo.
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