The Trilogy of Power includes the solo-performances RIGHT ON! (2015), Lacuna (2017) and Diagonal Vertigo (2019) conceived by Daniela Marcozzi with the contribution of Peter Rose, Luigi de Cicco, Carlo Bortolini, Susanne Kasper, Silvia Prolunghi, Pierluigi Muscolino, Christina Kyriazidi and Antonio Villella, who supported the creative process since 2015. The performances have premièred in Berlin and are now touring internationally.

The idea of the Trilogy of Power was born from the artistic collaboration of Daniela and Peter Rose, mentor and friend. RIGHT ON! and Lacuna were created with his artistic support.
The driving force of the Trilogy of Power is the exploration of the influence that political power has on the invidual. Political power is understood by the author at first as power:

Before being political, power is pure  power - strenght - driving push.

Through the artistic processes of the Trilogy of Power the author transforms the political power into a personal and innate force that pushes the individual to survive and to find the own life strength.

The political aspect is a pretext that serves the author in photographing the exact moment when the deprivation of strength should be responded to with strength, a vital momentum full of love, revenge but also despair and anger.

The political power proposed by the Trilogy is a moment in which our universe asks us to realign ourselves, but there are no directions or solutions, only a deep listening, so that we don't mistake the way of salvation with that way of non-return.

And whether you walk in balance on a bridge suspended in thin air, whether you find yourself being responsible for a massacre, or victims of injustice, the Trilogy wants to be a way to reach that center of life within which, the resistance and transformation of power can become a dispenser of force - towards the slow and painful attainment of the power-of-being.

The 3 performances originate themselves by autobiographical and/or real events of the recent Italian political world.

 

RIGHT ON!, first chapter of the Trilogy, is inspired by a tragic event happened one summer night in June 2013 when the police break into the flat that the author shares with five others in Perugia (IT).

At the end of the search, three of her flatmates are accused of international terrorism and imprisoned for one year in preventive detention, without process, in accordance with the Italian anti-terrorism law 270 bis. When power is unjust, it becomes a prevaricating force that imposes a choice on us: this is the beginning of our transformation.

Thus begins the Trilogy of Power, in which the real events are the dramaturgical core of the performances while power is a pretext to search for new physical-political narrative. The body, as a territory where forces meet and interact, is the absolute protagonist of the Trilogy: we see it castrated, submissive, punished, but also dancing - light, fast, dreamy.

 

In the second chapter Lacuna, the body is the non-place where a state secret is kept: the body of the crime, emptied and re-enabled in a “Clockwork Orange” style.

The autobiographical aspect of Lacuna is an alarm clock that didn't wake up the train-driver G. Marcozzi (father of the author) on August 2nd, 1980, the day of The Blogna massacre - La strage di Bologna, a terror attach that killed 85 people and wounded over 200.

If the author's father would have gone at work on time, he would have been exactly on the waiting room of the Bologna train station, where the explosion of the bomb happened.

The protagonist (the secret agent Lacuna) tries to rationalize and decompose, to imagine what are the plots and forces that have brought her up to there.

It is not an easy process: before the tribunal of one's own self, one is always alone, and inadequate both in body and in words. In fact, Lacuna speak a mumbled and clumsy English, that increases the sense of inadequacy and the absurdity that always accompany the attempt to explain and to rationalize.
Especially if you face the law, whose diction is impeccable, clear and annihilating.

 

It is by sensing the walls of nothingness that we find ourselves suspended in the abyss with Diagonal Vertigo, the third performance of the Trilogy, linked to the previous ones through the fil-rouge of the absurd. This time the protagonist is not at a crossroads, but he is launched with speed towards a point of non-return. The last chapter of the Trilogy of Power, inspired by the collapsing of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa, Italy, far from proposing a happy-ending, is rather the consecration of that inexplicable component of absurdity that imperturbable continues to make the Earth shake under our feet.

 

Text by Luigi De Cicco

Artworks by Carlo Bortolini