The Art of the Fugue or  how to run away, a play from Switzerland, is a game of hands... they play and speak, mask and unmask themselves between right and  left, rational and irrational....all in a bid to find the centre balanced on a tightrope. Director Mauro Guindani speaks to Saritha Saraswathy Balan on the making of the play, presented at the Jashne Bachpan Children's Theatre Festival

The Art of the Fugue or How to Run Away uses illusion and it’s unmasking, through acting, to ask to oneself and the audience questions about daily reality. The basic theme is the ‘fugue’ - that breathless movement in search of who knows what, that each one of us experiences once in a lifetime  in losing and finding oneself. The play, presented at the Jashne Bachpan Children’s Theatre festival on Thursday, is a story on lilo, a restless duck who is in search of her identity.

About linking the idea of identity with a duck, the director says that in the beginning he just started with the plot, later it ended up relating it to a duck. “Ducks not only live in Duckburg: we  find  them  everywhere, like the Chinese, Turks or Americans. As a matter of fact, they have always existed and sometimes it is easy to confuse them with geese. The ducks too have the right to escape from daily life, as do geese if they want to avoid becoming sheep," “the director elaborates his perspective on identity.

The play is a monologue told to an imaginary young acrobat. It’s  presented through instinctive language of the body, something an actor can attain only through self-control. About this, solo actor of the play, Ava loiacono says: “I am trained for that since years. Playing with puppets was a part of my training. On stage, I should have focus, with my right hand, left and my body, which I have been trained for years,” she says.

“I want the communication to happen freely, not to be artificial and it has to be natural. My body has to come in terms with the music as well,” says the 63 year old actress. About the contradiction of running away and searching for an identity, she says, “Everybody deserves to run away at least once in a life. You can find something while you do that, but you deserve it.”

“In the play- which is in a very rigorous musical form- all possibilities of variations in a theme are explored, through the twists of the ricer car. The play can be performed in English, French,  Italian, or Spanish,” says the director.

The 69 year old director writes more in German, one of the languages used in Switzerland. The play has been presented at 25 different cities worldwide and has been well received by the adults and the children alike. “I wrote it for children of a higher age group and I am happy that they could relate themselves with the theme- identity. I write for both children and adults. In Switzerland we conduct children's drama festival at least once in a year,” he says.  Guindani is a theatre and opera director. He was born in Italy and besides being an Italian he is fluent in French, German, English and Spanish languages.

 About Funambulist, the name of the theatre group, he says, “The action of a funambulist is a metaphor for a young man’s maturing process, towards becoming an adult, his sense of responsibility and his independence. On the other hand, the acrobat, in the play,  himself is a symbol of a man who stays in balance between the two worlds: of everyday reality and that of the immense potential of creativity and imagination which lays hidden in everyone of us. The name, The Funambulist, chosen for our company, can therefore indicate the direction and content of our programme, and the chosen scenic language. As in its previous plays, Funambulist made use of dummies and ventriloquism in the play. But this time the music acts as an underlying theme.

 “We believe in the plurality of disciplines in the scenic arts at a professional level, and the variety of the projects. The universality of the theatrical language, gestures, movements, as well as that of music allows a production to extend the circuit of the performances to other Swiss cantons and to foreign countries too. The set, the props, the costumes and the lights have been reduced to the bare minimum, not so much out of necessity but more so because of a choice of style. The scenic impact depends entirely on the performer’s ability,” the director concludes.