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RADIO DELIRIO 

 

Written and choreographed by Alessandro Magania 

Photo: Daniel Jack Lyons

A piano recital featuring only the page turner. A radio program hot on the trail of a whistleblower hiding in plain view of the audience. RADIO DELIRIO imagines a classical concert taken over by the man no one was even meant to notice. While dutifully minding the score, the page-turner weaves his own show over the music: a news exposé, cum manhunt - cum chronicle of a precarious sense of self. The language of investigative news is employed - warped and digressed from - counterpointed by a layered, hyperkinetic physical score. Drawing on the culture of surveillance and whistleblowing scandals. Radio Delirio presents a tragicomic take on assimilation, derailment, and fear of inconsequence.

Written and Choreographed by Alessandro Magania

Performed by Kim Macron, Alessandro Magania, Mickey Solis

Directed by Geoff Sobelle

Produced by Sandra Garner, Lingua Franca Arts

Music Performed by Jae Kyo Han

Production Design by Simone Peretti

Lighting by Dallas Estes

Lighting Assistant Rachel Fae Szymanski

Sound by Andrew Maillet

Stage Manager Emma Johnson

 

running time: 1hr 

 

Radio Delirio was developed with collaborations from Jarrod Beck, Steve Cuiffo, Glenn Fitzgerald, Shae D’Lyn, Ben Williams.

Photos @Maria_Baranova

Personal Statement

A couple of years ago I came across an article that implicated the C.I.A. in a failed drug trafficking case, following leads given by a number of eyewitnesses that had been involved in the procedures. It was in a small, independent website. Informants and information appeared legitimate - some of the whistleblowers were airport and embassy officials cited by name - but the revelation never made it past a small online community. Thinking about these informants I wondered, what kind of outcome had they anticipated - or hoped for - when they had gone on record? Did they foresee possibly being incriminated? Did they go into hiding? What if someone had found happiness in both the self-marginalization and implied state of notoriety yielded by their revelation, would they avoid finding out the true outcomes?

 

With Radio Delirio I wanted to explore displacement as a kind of safety zone. Having lived for the majority of my life outside of the country in which I was born and raised (Italy), I’ve always been conscious of the degree to which one can choose to assimilate into the social fabric that surrounds them, and how connected that is to a sense of accomplishment in the immigrant experience. Can self-worth be built without measuring up to society? The page turner in Radio Delirio has found solace in the state of anonymity into which he claims he’s been forced.  It has given him an excuse to extract himself from a game he feels has no regard for him. What I wanted to present on stage is a rendition of the internal support system that comes into play when the truths we choose to believe become unstable. The radio program he envisions sees him as the subject of public attention while affirming his need to stay in the shadow. Similarly, imagining a net of surveillance and investigations around him is not used to suggest paranoia, but as a contemporary form of validation, a projection of a life less inconsequential.

 

The movement vocabulary of the piece often takes its cue from action and espionage movies, isolating some the most recognizable physical conventions and then streamlining them into choreography patterns, posture shifts, and dynamics that suggest their embodiment without falling into mimicry. The body in a state of alertness or emanating a deceivingly calm appearance; swift, expert movements and subtle hints that the body we are seeing is in a space it should not occupy. But also passages that emphasize the incongruities presented in the piece: a momentary jolt of morale, the weight of an irreversible act, physical notations made by someone constantly questioning his own body language and himself.  

ALESSSANDRO MAGANIA

PRODUCTION DATES

June 2018 - The Performing Garage NYC (premiere) *

October 2016 - Prelude Festival CUNY (work in progress excerpt)

Septemebr 2016 - Little Theatre @ Dixon Place. NYC (work in progress) 

* Presented as part of The Performing Garage Presents, The Wooster Group’s visiting artists program supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. This production was also supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

Radio Delirio was developed in part through residencies at YADDO (Saratoga Springs, NY), P.A.R.T.S. (Bruxelles, BE) and Centro Mousikè (Bologna, IT). 

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