concept Luigi de Angelis and Chiara Lagani
artistic consultants Tahar Lamri, Rodolfo Sacchettini
commentator Rodolfo Sacchettini

promotion and press office Marco Molduzzi
logistics Sergio Carioli
administration Marco Cavalcoli and Debora Pazienza

production Napoli Teatro Festival Italia
in co-production with Ravenna Festival, Fanny & Alexander, Tempo Reale
in collaboration with Festival delle Colline Torinesi - Torino Creazione Contemporanea, and Fondazione Teatro Piemonte Europa - Teatro a Corte, Santarcangelo 41 - Festival Internazionale del Teatro in Piazza
and in collaboration with Rai Radio 3

«338171 TEL has the quality of a sort of game.

There.

Since that makes very little sense it may be right.

338171 TEL soundlessly invites one to play a game consisting of involved attempts to find out the game’s own rules

How about that.

The rules of the game are 338171 TEL, and to play is to be played.

And now? Find out the rules of 338171 TEL!»

(DFW via F&A)

The show T.E.L., the starting point of the radio drama 338171 TEL, is a device for utopian communications. Two actors, placed in two different places, distant in space, maybe also in time, but constantly connected via satellite internet, will give birth to a long-distance discussion. Two different audiences will be the simultaneous witnesses of their possible-impossible dialogue.

In the radio drama 338171 TEL, which takes place simultaneously with the show T.E.L. – and which is therefore an integral but autonomous part of it – a commentator in a third place (a radio studio) wiretaps the dialogue between the two actors, picking up the sound events from the two venues where the show takes place, interpreting them and rewriting live a further possible story, which runs parallel to the show's one. The sounds from the two theatre venues, in fact, convey in the radio drama the atmosphere and the key themes of the show: but the commentator, manipulating and using them as a sound material of what means to be a kind of live sports report, will make them accessible by the audience in a new form, inviting the listeners to a direct participation, in form of allusive game, in the ongoing theatre event. Hence the radio drama, through the commentator's voice, creates a kind of progressive aerial and ludic map of the mythical territory touched by the show, involving the listeners in the complex explanation of what, little by little, appears to be the rules of a mysterious game (inspired by David Foster Wallace's Eschaton in the novel Infinite Jest) in which the audience is somehow called to take part. This game, of which the launching and the first competiton are announced, involves two participants in two different places, between whom the commentator establishes an unceasing acoustic connection. And yet, although the apparently regular course of this strange competition, this game will always be an object imbued with mystery, little by little revealing itself to be a rich soil for the creation of a real metaphor on theatre, on the relation among actor, artwork and community.

1 July 2011
Napoli
Rai Radio 3
Napoli Teatro Festival Italia

16 October 2011
Bologna
Città del capo - Radio Metropolitana, Bologna
VIE Scena Contemporanea Festival