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1. It won't be a performance. It won't be a “mise en scène", it will be a "mise en vie“. 2. The starting point of the "mise en vie" will be the chorus of paiotini. Jarry hasn't created the myth of Übu: nobody can create a myth. They exist. The myth of Übu alredy existed, it spread in different versions in the school where Jarry went from 15 to 18 years, in Rennes. As all the myths, it has been fashioned in the oral tradition, based on the mountain of caricatures, jokes, grimaces and stories raised by the Breton teenagers in honour of a physics teacher, a certain Hebert. The chorus of teenagers creates a huge puppet; Jarry raises it by his talent to the History, he builds the first, strong variation that, with a prestidigitation move, will pass from the oral level of a provincial school to the level of the Big Literature, of the symboiist avant-garde, of the New Theatre. Behind Jarry and his Übu there are Rabelais, Shakespeare, many centuries of popular carnival tradition, and the pupils of Rennes, as behind Sophocle and his Oedipus there Is Greece. 3. A "mise en vie" always got a starting point outside the text. It is out of text. Our starting point are the palo- • tini of Ravenna, who since many years attend the "no-school " of Teatro delle Albe. They are more than three-hundred, coming from all the high schools of the city: from this forge will come out the chorus of paiotini that will surround Mother and Father Übu. 4. Romagna Bretagna. Jarry always bound inferior and sublime, popular
and high culture, and he always looked to the Breton roots, to the celtio language and subsoil of his region. The idea of death, the permanent exploration of the other world, the need of absolute are expressions of the big pre-christian myths. The Breton language is for Jarry a way of literary creation, its “langue de l'affectivité". Behind Übu, before Gargantua, there is Hok Bras, the giant,the greedy and stupid ogre of the Breton legends. Behind the paiotini, the violent soldier servants of Mother and Father Übu, there are the Korrigans, unrestrained elves, creatures of the night, enemies of the Christian day-symbols, that can draw an ignorant traveller in their circle dance, and dance until make him die. Jarry feeds his pages with this dark, archaic, wild bottom that lives buried in the psyche of all men. 5. Jarry was waiting for us: the use of the dialect, the relation with the origins and the tradition, the mix of popular culture and avant-garde, farce and allegory, all this characteristic of our work since many years. Jarry was waiting for us: Romagna and Bretagna. Campiano and Laval. In Romagna the Korrigans were catted Mezapégul: some bad, infernal goblins, that scream bad words and hold tightly the women's neck when they are in bed. Pêdar (father) and Mêdar (mother) Übu have some ancestors in the tradition of Romagna; some giant puppets, some masks that comes from the underworld, devils or dead's souls, they devour the alives and there is no way out. They are monsters, dragons. And they make us laugh. Camporesi wrote about Romagna that it is like “South-eastern Ireland“,
underlining how deep are in this land, in rural clans and in city tribes, the influences of the magic Celtic world. 6. Who are Pêdar and Mêdar Übu? They are futurists. They adore cars and cement, and they pose like statues. They don't Uve in country, they live on the highway, in the middle of neons and "the violent electric moons" evoked by Marinetti. They want all and immediately. They don't know what is patience, this old country virtue. They uproot everything what is on their way, tree or man. They live a mass futurism, between the TV and the shooting, killer cars. The refrigerator is overflowing with food, but they are tormented by the atavie fear to be left "without'. They despise the Japanese people because they are all identical, because they are full of money and they take the liberty of buying everything, and in their hearts (but do they have a heart?) they would like to take their brain off. They use dialect, vomited with Italian words and the English of Californian serials. It seems to us that this is the comic language of those heavy puppets, the surrealistic language of deads that talk to us in the dreams, more close to the "pataphysical" verbal inventiveness of Jarry than to the mere Italian. Italian is not enough, it hasn't got a belly: its belly is the dialect. 7. Its evident: any homesick. When we talk of "popular we don't mean (we never meant) to dip our pen in the ink of the country idyl. The "popular, the “monster is in the unconscious, or it darts on a highway.