Fabiana Iacozzilli, a Roman director who has made her mark on the scene with visually striking productions, directs En Abyme, a work written by Tolja Djoković exploring the theme of immersion into a bottomless depth, the abyss as a subtle and constant presence. A continuous chant in which images, actions, settings, sounds and words interact, creating new meanings.
The text is rooted in James Cameron’s explorations of the ocean depths: just as the Canadian director reached the deepest point of the Mariana Trench, so Djoković plunges into the depths of the intimate dynamics of the human being.
En Abyme intersects and overlaps four distinct narrative levels: there is the ‘documentary’, centred precisely on Cameron’s feat; ‘She, He and The Girl’, dedicated to the story of a father-daughter relationship; ‘The Eye’, that is, the lens of a camera which, metaphorically replicating the director’s work on Titanic, captures a woman’s daily life; finally, there is ‘Marianne’, the female protagonist of the story who vies with the ‘documentary’ for the role of narrator of the abyss.
“In my work,” explains Tolja Djoković, winner of the ‘under 40’ playwriting competition at the Biennale College Teatro 2021/22 – the central theme of the descent into the abyss is fundamental, a situation that exemplifies different states of mind: on the one hand, the fear of sinking to the bottom; on the other, the introduction of discoveries that can only be made by those willing to take the risk of getting lost”.
di
Tolja Djokovic
regia
Fabiana Iacozzilli
con
Simone Barraco
Oscar De Summa
Francesca Farcomeni
Evelina Rosselli
e con
Aurora Occhiuzzi
spazio scenico
Giuseppe Stellato
costumi
Chiara Aversano
disegno luci
Omar Scala
musica e disegno sonoro
Tommy Grieco
regista assistente
Cesare Del Beato
assistente costumi
Valentina Cerasuolo
Fabiana Amato
regia video
Raffaele Rossi
Nicolas Spatarella
Fabiana Iacozzilli
produzione
Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, Fondazione Teatro di Napoli – Teatro Bellini, LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, Cranpi, Elsinor
produzione esecutiva
Fondazione Teatro di Napoli – Teatro Bellini
con il supporto di
Carrozzerie N.O.T., Fivizzano27
si ringraziano
A. S. D. Scuola Nuoto Vomero, Casa Donelli
riprese video
direttore della fotografia
Francesco Savaglia
fonico video
Alberto Mancini
assistente operatore
Fiamma Olivieri
assistenti scene set
Francesco Sepe
Fabio Cosimo
attrezzeria set
Maria Esposito
Maria Pia Esposito Papa
trucco e parrucco
Cristina Correra
con
Oscar De Summa
Francesca Farcomeni
Aurora Occhiuzzi
e con
Rino Di Martino
Sofia Rumolo
Annachiara Salzano
Virginia Puzo
Tolja Djoković’s text recounts the attempts, on the one hand by James Cameron and on the other by a young girl/woman, to bring fragments of an unexplored abyss back to the surface. As for Cameron, the challenge is to descend into the Challenger Deep – at the heart of the Mariana Trench – a place where no one before him had ever been, and to attempt to resurface with some certainty about that unknown world. As for the girl/woman’s descent, the journey into her depths brings fragments of life to the surface: glimpses of a past lived with a father and perhaps even repressed, moments of solitude accompanied only by the viewing of James Cameron’s film Titanic.
En Abyme is a play on reflections, a prismatic work which, by employing a Droste-effect structure, continually shifts the perspective on the events narrated and makes us question who we are, who is watching us, and what we are capable of bringing back to light within ourselves.
The director’s intention is to accompany the audience on these two immersions, to act as an additional gaze upon a descent which, whilst plunging into a cavernous abyss reminiscent of the womb, becomes above all a stubborn search for a father, for a relationship with the paternal, and for the desire to be seen and recognised by the father.
The performance, through a constant dialogue between the four-part dramaturgical framework – The Eye of the Camera, The Mariana Trench, The Documentary and The Captions – and the staging, which, as if it were a film to be watched and rewatched in search of a trace, places the projected images of the girl/woman’s life at the centre of the narrative, explores the possibility of capturing, within a single frame of our lives, a connection between an inside and an outside, and the possibility of re-emerging alive from the Mariana Trench present within each of us.
Having graduated in Italian Philology and Literature with a thesis on the practice of reading poetry aloud, she began her theatre career with Fanny & Alexander, with whom she trained and worked, as well as with Menoventi and the Teatro del Lemming. She directed and performed in her first work in 2010, Letters from the Young L. – a performance for voice and shadow, inspired by the correspondence between Lucrezia Borgia and Pietro Bembo. In 2019, she completed the advanced course in International Dramaturgy at the Iolanda Gazzerro Theatre School of ERT. In 2020, she wrote an episode of the radio drama Hotel Blue Moon, directed by Roberto Latini and produced by the Fondazione Teatro Metastasio.
In 2021, she served as dramaturgical consultant for La regina della neve – Libro performatico by Eva Costa, presented in Italy in seven episodes on Radio3 in 2023; she was also dramaturg on an ERT artist-in-residence project, for which she curated Docenti e Alunni Danzano – DAD: Gruppo di ricerca drammaturgica e coreografica. Also in 2021, she won the Biennale College Teatro’s Autori Under 40 award for her text En Abyme. The text was presented as a mise en lecture the following year and then in its complete theatrical form at the 51st Venice Biennale International Theatre Festival, directed by Fabiana Iacozzilli.
Since 2018, she has been a playwright and director for the group tostacarusa, founded together with Aura Ghezzi. For tostacarusa, she wrote and directed Tu eri turbolenta (Quirk of fate), selected by the Risonanze Network, Senza vivere senza – Il racconto della Mortella, a staged reading for an actress and a garden, and Discorso delle Dorotke – reading per due sorelle.
A director and playwright, she pursues research centred on stage dramaturgy and the expressive potential of the performer. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Teatro Vascello since 2013 and has collaborated with Cranpi and Carrozzerie N.O.T. since 2017. In 2008, she founded the Lafabbrica theatre company and has been a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab since 2011. Her productions include: Aspettando Nil, with which she won the Undergroundzero Festival in New York; La trilogia dell’attesa, winner of the Play Festival (Atir and Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d'Europa); Da soli non si è cattivi. Tre atti unici based on the stories of T. Tomasulo; La classe, which won the CURA 2018 interregional residency competition, the 2019 In-Box Award, the 2019 ANCT Critics’ Award and received four nominations at the 2019 Ubu Awards (best sound design won by H. Westkemper). In July 2020, Una cosa enorme premiered at the 2020 Biennale Teatro and was restaged at REF2021. In 2021, he directed Abitare il ritorno, a community theatre project conceived by Asinitas and included in INCROCI – an exchange project between organisations using theatre as a tool for cultural interaction – and in the international theatre exchange project Literacy Act. In 2022, Abitare il ritorno won the CIVIS Open/Lab/Civic Engagement Call for Proposals – “Teatro delle migrazioni” Theatre Festival. In 2022, she curated the mise en lecture of En Abyme for the 2022 Venice Biennale.
