Circus Audienti

for voices, video, journalist, ensemble and electronics

a commission by Festival Aperto 2023

In 1973 a particular project took place in Reggio Emilia to bring the public closer to contemporary music: not through lectures or concerts, but by the ancient confrontational form of public debate. The participants were, on the one hand, protagonists of Italian music at the time such as composers Luigi Nono and Armando Gentilucci, pianist Maurizio Pollini, and conductor Claudio Abbado, all determined to present the grounds and reasons behind the New Music. On the other were workers, laborers, students, political representatives and trade unionists willing to engage in even harshly critical, sometimes dramatic confrontation.
The title of the initiative, “Musica/Realtà” – Music/Reality – aimed to extend the traditional musical experience far beyond the walls of the concert hall, intertwining it with the sounds of everyday life, bonding it with the ideologies, political aspirations and cultural ambitions of the working classes.

In Circus Audienti spectators find themselves immersed in the debates of that time: surrounded by the voices, by the musicians of the ensemble, but also by interviews produced for the occasion or from restricted archives, and flash-mob interviews recorded just before the performance.
The result is a circus audienti et disceptatores of sounds, moods, noises, memories, words, images and bodies, in which the enviable vitality of that reality transcends temporal boundaries to connect with the reality of today.

Does it still make sense to ask what the relationship between New Music and our everyday lives might be?