ON THE THRESHOLD (excerpt from)

by Simona Lisi

 
During the course of his work, Crisafulli doesn’t proceed with an inductive method, keeping actors and co-creators abreast of all cultural and imaginative motives of the project. He doesn’t create definitive expectations and desires. He doesn’t compute or order things. Instead he creates the right conditions for things to happen and waits for their unveiling. This means that the performer often finds themself in a situation of uncertainty, and sometimes uncomfortable. A situation that could be the prelude to nothing – or, as it turns out later – to everything.

Crisafulli proceeds by deduction, in an apparently casual way, from a precedent that’s not only the historical and aesthetic background of the project, but also the situation in which you find yourself in rehearsals, which includes current time and space, the lives and soma of the participants (and therefore also their physical and vocal manifestations), the superimposition of prior historical, visual and conceptual information, and their varying possibilities. He does this by listening, adopting a ‘state’ of expectation, guiding and waiting for accomplishment.

Simona Lisi, On the Treshold, in Nika Tomasevic (ed.), Place, Body, Light. The Theatre of Fabrizio Crisafulli, 1991-2011, Artdigiland, Dublin 2013, p. 322.