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[…] The performance has developed into a combination of repetitive physical actions, like factory workers at their daily work. Sounds become obsessive rhythms […] the solitary worker tries to break the monotony of his life – but there is no escape. […] Pianzola sits facing the back wall on top of a 150cm high metal…
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[…] The performer begins with his back to audience, sat on a large metal stool and then the explosive performance begins. The stool elevates Pianzola physically but also acts as a claustrophobic steel cage, a levitation device and a means to convey the heavy iron industry that is being depicted on stage. Video projections are…
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In a fusion of intense physicality, vocalisation and performance, we open to a backlit monk-like figure chanting in Italian. A religious introduction to the story of a manual worker labouring in factory hell. Here, we learn that economical necessity keeps him there though he yearns to leave. […] Nicola Pianzola takes us on a dramatic journey.…
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There comes a point in the middle of Made in ILVA where you feel as if you might be going mad yourself. Hallucinating the fact that performer Nicola Pianzola keeps repeating over and over “the brutalisation” while hammering the steel set with his palms (which are surely by now raw). Delirious with the metal rhythms…
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[…] In the Taranto 30% of the population have lung tumors while the factory is still thriving financially. Therefore the piece voices anti-capitalist views highlighting how society accepts to sweep issues like these under the carpet or under a pile of ever-growing dead bodies. Through repetitive mechanical movements Pianzola puts his body through pure exhaustion…
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Inspired by the controversial ILVA steelworks in Taranto, Italy, Made in ILVA – The Contemporary Hermit, is more than a simple lesson in politics. In fact, it spins a wider tale of a dystopian present where the man-made is replacing nature; as we are told in the disembodied opening monologue, clouds are being created and…
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All theatre is physical, but some theatre is more physical […], [just like] this writhing, sweaty, angry solo performance by Nicola Pianzola of the Instabili Vaganti theatre company […]. […]the performance deals less in facts and figures than in imagery and gesture. On a carefully lit, very small acting area, Pianzola rocks back and forth…
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THE title of this solo show used to be the proud slogan for a huge steel plant in Southern Italy. But as Nicola Pianzola puts his own body through the mill of an unrelentingly physical performance, he voices the appalling human cost of production there: injuries, illnesses, even deaths. […] A metal frame which started…
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[…] Made in ILVA comes laden with prizes and anchored by a performance of punitive intensity by Nicola Pinzola. Subtitled The Contemporary Heremit, the piece was inspired by truly scandalous conditions at an Italian steelworks. The impressively wiry Pinzola is both the embodiment of these real-life horrors and their brutally poetic mouthpiece. Instabili Vaganti’s production…
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Work, work, work. Never stopping, fighting to meet the productivity deadlines… That’s all there is – that and a fitful night’s sleep, dreaming terrible dreams, until it is time to get up and get back on the treadmill. That is the sum of a working man’s life. Surrounded on three sides by audience, a lone…