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 Capital’s press review

“The strong element, even in the exchange with the ‘normal’ public, lies in the deepening of ideas, rights, behavioral models. A beautiful and profitable experience for every spectator who will come across it.”
Gianfranco Capitta, Il Manifesto

“In Italy Kepler-452 is undoubtedly the standard-bearer of political theatre, in the highest and most complete sense of the adjective: that is, in the sense of a poetics and practice closely linked to the concept of community. (…) 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.”
Enrico Fiore, Controscena

“It’s not just (and it’s already a lot) narrative of worker identity today, outside ideological schemes. It’s also a comparison with all of us: it is the spectators who are asked the question that journalists usually ask those who risk their job: “How are you?”. How are we who think we are less exploited and more fortunate? 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.”
Mario De Santis, HuffPost Italia

“In this work emerges the breath of those adventures greater than oneself from which one emerges either with completely broken bones or – as in this case – with a work that goes beyond the initial theme and pedagogical pitfalls, full of tensions, emotions, nuances, and perspectives of meaning. A work in which the accounts don’t add up and the contradictions explode bringing with them beautiful flashes of truth. (…) The show ended with a very exciting standing ovation from the audience, a sort of spontaneous promise to continue the fight together.”
Rossella Menna, Doppiozero

“Capital 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 that identifies itself in the poses and customs of the left, despite having deserted its historical places and instruments of struggle. (…) For the writer, the heart of this work is also and above all the factory itself: the factory as a landscape, with its scale in part superhuman in size and proportions, with the lights, always on that tear apart the night, the incessant clatter of the machines, the stench of the oily sediments, that alienating arrangement of gray patches in the territories between the last suburbs and the first, hairless countryside.”
Andrea Zangari, Teatro e Critica

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