Aren’t gloominess, worries and anxieties prevailing? So what we need is an elixir. Thus we have decided to dig out one of the research lines that characterized our work as a group from the very beginning, namely clownery. We told ourselves: “isn’t it true that he, the clown, is nowadays the real symbol of theatre, even more than Hamlet or Harlequin? Isn’t the theatre as a whole risking a fiasco in these days of budget cut offs, isn’t it risking to end up like Yorik?”. So let’s cheer up, let’s have our elixir, let’s try to lough it out.

Bianco and Augustus are standing there – they need that little: simple clothes, a few objects, hardly any technical demands. This is the show: a dialogue made of somersaults and pretended pinches and punches. Spoken in dialect, macaronic French, highbrow Italian which contrasts dramatically with clown’s rags and boxed ears. Made of rhythm and bravura. Made of somersaults. Made of material poetry. Bianco and Augustus are clowns; which  may sound a petty thing, or too trivial a theme for a show – well that’s only to those who cannot recognize the sheer complexity of comicality. This is, after all, the foundation of theatre.

These two guys abuse and threat each other. They talk among themselves and only about their own business: but, as it happens with clowns, it is as if the audience were standing on stage next to them. And they – apparently intent in their own exhibited hostility and hidden fondness – may any moment stop their talking to ogle a spectator or question another. They go wrong even in the smallest things, like clowns would do; but they make it up with some acrobatics. Jacques Lecoq, who knows a great deal about clownery, once said that a clown is one who fails entirely, so that he helps the spectator to come to terms with his own fiascos, eventually he puts the spectator in a vantage position. But you cannot fail just like that, even failing must be a bravura. This is the clown’s job: show the fiasco, never be afraid of it. That’s also why they do not depend on the spaces that host them – theatre halls, squares, streets, schools, prisons, gardens are all the same to them.