Renato Palazzi, delteatro.it

Variations on the end – Post-it
«The young theatre collective company Teatro Sotterraneo, based in Florence, makes a thorough, original reflection on the meaning of end. The four skilled performers – actors would be a limited definition – constantly enter the slashed black cube with their arms and legs, hands and feet. They move around with perfect rhythm and synchrony, a dance combining the comic aspects of silent films and accuracy of micro-movement contemporary dance. Yet, the show is much more – the beginning is pretty much all about the body, but then the focus shifts onto surreal, funnily light social satire. Their aim is to unveil hypocrisy, the usual hot air and fashion hiding and sweetening today’s world, where the language of television and press conferences, modern and polite slang prevails. A feeble attempt is made at softening the inevitabile, tragic consequences of a hand grenade; the dead prompting the funeral oration to a clumsy speaker; an actor telling the endings of films and fairytales; a phone call made on stage. The common thread running within the show is the will to reveal the objective and end of what’s around us, with the certainty that everything is bound to end one day. Objects of all kinds are carefully wrapped up, unwrapped, used and eventually thrown away: wine bottles and a pencil, a t-shirt and a glass, even the man himself, wrapped up in cellophane and inexorably taken out of stage. A lively, ironic, fresh and clever show, a way in between comic sketches and witty satire».

Laura Bevione, Hystrio

Teatro Sotterraneo. A true collective group without hierarchies. It was formed in Florence and adopts a variety of communication techniques. No traditional narration. Lots of laughs.
«We saw them at the last edition of Short Formats in Milan and had fun. Lots of fun. Teatro Sotterraneo is a collective theatre group based in Florence and formed in 2004 by four performers and a playwright. Over the past years it stood out within research theatre circles for its original productions and research – they do not have a director and stress the importance on a shared approach. Their work is characterised by a melting pot of theatre, performing and visual arts, video art, play writing, design, videogames, music, pop culture. Post-it – the show the company is touring with throughout Italy – has a strikingly simple structure and strong communication power. It’s all set in a slashed black cube being entered in and out as if in a visual and verbal cut-up, a continuous implosion typical of a ‘final sketch’ – a deep analysis on the concept of entertainment. The result if an hour of continuous laughter – the reason lying in the stage cuts and the motto “revealing by concealing”, borrowed from Christo and Jeanne-Claude. They strike the spectator through cheerfulness and a relentless reflection on the state of representation, which is kept separated from narration. The group is part of Fies Factory One funding project, aimed at young research theatre companies which performed at Dro Festival. Go and see them – and have fun».

Carlo Orsini, Rolling Stone

Post-it: notes for a show
«An entertaining hour of contemporary ‘visual theatre’ to enjoy all in one gulp. A bite of humour in one moment, a message launched and wrenched right after, with no future reference or roots. The audience smile and clap. Post-it, cellophan metaphor of today’s disorientating, hiding world, rooted in transient postmodernism, is Teatro Sotterraneo experimental theatre company’s project staged at Limonaia Theatre in Sesto Fiorentino […]. Space is the great protagonist, black and limited by penetrable curtains, where moving bodies […] become means, language and volume of. the scene. The stage-box is an experimental incubator teeming with characters playing themselves as well as part of a unanimous chorus, hiding and coming out till the end, with no sign of a completion – half bodies, a leg, half arm, interrupted conversations. There’s a lot of objects on stage taking active part in the scenes, just as in Daniel Spoerri’s Arbeitstisch […]. Objects are wrapped up in paper and then unwrapped in a careless, calm removal session bordering on comic absurd. Everything is object of ridicule whilst maintenance work are going on on stage: funerals, entrails oozing on the floor, a list of film endings, adverts and mobile phones. Nothing seems to affect the young, still fairly inexperienced actors from Teatro Sotterraneo, who do a good job at getting visibility with this show. Reality is here again source of inspiration, with all its consumerism, use and abuse, squeezed till the last drop, embalmed to be resumed. The result is a series of spontaneous sketches where the word is optional. Even the vacuum-sealed ending sort of slips away over cellophane and its dead body. Apology of absence or of estrangement caused by it? Both».

Miriam Monteleone, www.eartmagazine.com

«The King is dead, long live the King. Everything is bound to die because it is alive. It is a message full of hope, green and positive, fresh as the Fab Four plus one. Everything is bent, gets damaged, dirty, broken, ends, and is deflated. It is life which is death or death which would not be there without life. Or rather, death is paradoxically the ultimate end of life. The last word of the novel which still has a role in the book’s last page. Post-it is the last creation – neither a performance nor a pièce or a show – is an project put together by Teatro Sotterraneo, based on the tricky concept of end sprinkled with light, shrewd and soft irony. Contents and style are hard to handle. Florence-based collective company accurately manage to balance the rhythm, based on finely wrought and woven, yet always simple and direct structures. […] The text is trimmed with lace and appears almost transparent, tissue paper, never seeking for sympathy. There is matter, there is dream, an advert reminding of De Chirico’s metaphysics and a continuous subtle game between audience and actors – always on the slippery edge, always swinging between reality and disclosed deceit, between true deceitfulness and artificial truths. The stage is a cube slashed à la Fontana. It’s a transformation, in a rapid flow of full and empty, of inside and out, of coming in and going out through synchronized choreography, bits and pieces, heads and bodies, of splits and oversights. A political, frustanting play. There’s a funny, grotesque scene – reminder of Kinkaleri and some Sagna – where a man in the wings is blown into pieces by a hand grenade, sign of our time, tick-tack of modernity. Entrails – Iraq, Afghanistan or Palestine – are thrown onto the stage floor while death is disguised, around the corner, simple and clean, in a reassuringly bureaucratic-military way – a war-like, politically correct, convincing and equidistant soap opera. Also very funny is the sketch of a dead man prompting his funeral oration speaker, like a prompter from a prompt-box in the fiction of ritual representation. Everything is denial, everything is doomed to end – thus, to be continued».

Tommaso Chimenti, www.scanner.it

Valeria Ottolenghi, Il Gazzettino di Parma

Post-it makes for an hour of desecrating fun
«Wednesday night at Primavera dei Teatri 2mila7 a fresh and original dance theatre performance was staged. the young actors from Florence-based collective company Teatro Sotterraneo performed Post-it, an hour of sheer fun and a shower of witty, amusing sketches […]. The lights are up, a huge black empty cube on stage – Sara Bonaventura, Iacopo Braca, Matteo Ceccarelli, and Claudio Cirri frantically moving around. Irreverent, grotesque, peculiar Post-it is a clever, never-ending competition between actors and audience, reality and fiction, in a climax of rhytm and skills until the End. The black box is entered by bodies coming and going, way in between the real world and the unknown, and by lots of objects of all sort, which randomly become the stage. The box is filled up and emptied of today’s high-tech world; film endings told to the audience, mobiles chirping, in a big, visionary and surreal melting pot. Post-it is all and nothing, is a run, a movement from and to somewhere else – but where? To the End?  Yet, the End of everything is Death, often bursting onto the stage […]. it’s good fun watching the skilled collective group actors playing […]. running on and off stage, provocations and chaos, a lot of action and a few words, constructing and deconstructing – that is to say, a vacuum-sealed End, wrapped up in aseptic, huge cellophane. What else to say? Go and see the show, it’s worth every penny. A funny, outstanding performance, polished by Teatro Sotterraneo through clearness and linguistic accuracy».

Domenico Donato, Il quotidiano della Calabria