The Shadow of the Earth (L’Ombra della Terra)

Nota per i lettori italiani: potete trovare tutti i dettagli su “L’Ombra della Terra” in questo sito (if you read Italian, then you can find much more on “The Shadow of the Earth” in this website).

This idea was born more than ten years ago, when I was in Chile. During the months preceding my departure to South America, the New Theater in my small town had just started its activity, after the long, forced pause caused by the strong earthquakes that devastated Friuli in May and September 1976. Among the first shows to go on the new stage were “Zitto Menocchio” by Massimo Somaglino (actor and director) and “l’Insium” by Glauco Venier (jazz piano player and composer). I brought them with me up to the Andes, and started dreaming. The farther the dry landscape of the Atacama desert was from the green Friulian hills, the closer I was feeling my homeland, with a strong desire of sharing with others the experience (unique in many aspects) I had the privilege to live. It was with those two men in mind that I started working on some ideas, nursing a dream (insium) that (I was sure) sooner or later would become true.

Massimo Somaglino and the Pendulum

If the first steps of this project were certainly taken in the Southern parts of the Atacama desert, it was with the beginning of operations on Cerro Paranal (some 600 km north of La Silla) that the idea has started to take shape. At an altitude of 2600m, in one of the most inhospitable corners of our planet, the European Organization for Astronomical Research has installed and operates four 8.2m telescopes. In an essential and crude nature the cutting edge of ground-based astronomical technology. An apparently clashing contradiction: the same contradiction which is the driving element of “The shadow of the Earth“. And overhead, covering everything, making you forget about your earthen roots, an amazing sky. It does not matter how many times you have seen it. It always leaves you breathless, without memories. And it was right there that some reflections were brought to their extremes, and the line to follow started to be drawn more clearly. I do not remember exactly, but it must have been 2002. Glauco had just published his CD Gorizia. We met and we started talking about the project, which at that time had not even a name. Years passed and nothing happened, although the ideas kept developing and unfolding. Until August 2007, when finally and suddenly, as sometimes happens, I felt I was ready. Or better, in the moment I realized that I would never be more ready than that, and it was time to free years of introspection and the desire of sharing. Especially after that magic night in Paranal, when I got out of the control room with an MP3 player. I lay down on the rocky soil of the desert, and under the dreadful vault of the sky with the Galactic center suspended above me, I set free the notes of “a racuei ti voi lis stelis” (I’ll pick up the stars for you), in the arrangement by Glauco. His piano, the saxophone of Klaus Gesing, and the Choir of Friuli Venezia-Giulia. Lost the perception of Earth, it looked like the sound was coming down from the stars, and I was falling into nothingness. An experience that I could call mystical, experienced by a man of science, and hence at the same time glorious and frustrating…

Numbers

This notwithstanding, when Massimo, Glauco and I met for the first time to kick-off the project, we had absolutely no idea on its content. But we all agreed about what the show would certainly not be. Not a theatrical piece in the classical sense, not a jazz concert and not a presentation on popular astronomy. The idea was in fact to extremise those contamination processes that Glauco and Massimo had several times used in music and theater. This time contamination would be even more radical, at a first glance almost a contradiction: the fusion of two artistic expressions with a scientific discipline, commonly associated to large numbers, mathematics and physics, and so at least apparently irreconcilable with art. In effects, the punch line is the exploration of this contradiction, in an attempt of unveiling its apparent nature, with the hope of rising once more the question on the twofold nature of man, the duality that emerges from the continuous conflict between rationality and emotionality. To achieve this we have decided to exaggerate the traits of this dichotomy. Actually, in our meetings, we often talked about is as a form of schizophrenia. But why choosing astronomy of all sciences? Why attempting to mix it with theater and flank it to music? Why, in general, trying to use it to communicate? It would make no sense to hide it: one of the reasons is that the show talks about ourselves, and about itself (self-reference is recurrent in the show). Therefore, it was clear from the very beginning that it had to include the elements which are our own, the passions which drive our lives. Glauco, with the contamination between different musical genders through his original compositive vein; Massimo with his strong expressive charge, committed to bring on the stage every day’s facts and to transfigure them; and myself, dragged by the fascination of the immense mirror of the starry sky and all that it invokes and evokes.

Glauco Venier

So, “The Shadow of the Earth” explores, or tries to explore, the different aspects of Astronomy, trespassing into not exactly scientific regions, stretching to forms and thoughts to which it is related in fleeting and ambiguous ways. The terror of emptiness, the vertigo of falling into the sidereal abyss, the artistic and philosophic inspiration that the night sky has generated in mankind. But also the awareness, accompanied by a shiver, that the sky we watch today is the same behold by man during the Stone Age; the same that completely different cultures share/d despite the great distances that separate them; the same, finally, that the descendants of the human stock will see in ten thousand years from now. The very black drape, pierced by light dots, that acts like a cultural substrate, which wraps us, which poses the same eternal questions. The frustration of not being able to touch it, of fervently desiring to study and understand it without being in fact able to do it, not completely at least. The search for truth, of one’s own truth, the place of mankind in the universe. The making of knowledge, bit by bit, human being by human being. And other topics, which we touch or even only hint at, to get to the ending, unexpected and disarming.

Pendulum

If we were asked what the purpose of all this is, perhaps the most appropriate answer would be “doing it“. For this reason we try to guide the public to some reflection, without necessarily conveying an explicit message, without attempting to sell any truth or give a lesson. Rather our own, personal and intimate vision. An interpretation, the same way science is of reality. And to do this we use music, words and images, exploring and taking advantage of their ambiguities, to give rise to emotions, and with the ultimate purpose of enabling the audience to experience what we had felt during the meetings that led to this show. Number falls are interspersed with excerpts from classical theater and poetry, original texts, musical improvisations, thoughts and astronomical images. Contrarily to what you would probably expect, there are no special effects (well, maybe the only one is the big pendulum that oscillates across the stage for the whole duration of the show). This is because the main characters are man and cosmos, two sufficiently complicated systems, which do not need any accessory. In the personality of a scientist, two aspects always co-exist: rationality and emotionality. And it is impossible to switch from one to the other without leaving some remnant behind. In the same way, when a musician composes or an actor recites, they do not behave following pure emotionality. Behind the scenes there is an intensive activity, a technical preparation, a logic which in some cases can be called scientific. An omnipresent duality, then.

In astrophysics, this reaches an extreme level. As De Santillana and Von Dechend wrote in their Hamlet’s Mill: “the science of astrophysics stretches on vaster and vaster orders of magnitude, without loosing its fulcrum; for mankind as such, this is not possible: in the depths of space it gets lost and looses the sense of its own importance. Finding its place in the context of modern astrophysics is impossible, short of falling into schizophrenia.”

This dichotomy is the leading theme of “L’Ombra della Terra“, although we touch upon other subjects. For instance the making of knowledge. Our perception of the world is influenced, obviously, by what we already know of it. The various pieces and bits accumulate to build up a wall. A wall that gives us the impression of robustness and stability, but which acts also as a barrier, preventing us from achieving an objective vision of reality and this, after all and paradoxically, is an obstacle to knowledge itself. But I will stop here… If you read Italian you can have a look to a critical reading by Max Olitz.

Why this title?

The Shadow of the Earth (Cerro Paranal - Chile)

“When the sun goes down, Paranal’s shadow grows longer to the east, flows over cerros and creeps into the quebradas, until it touches the horizon and it clibms the sky. Soon after, another shadow, more majestic, enormous, starts to rise. It is the Shadow of the Earth. The sun illuminates of planet from behind and casts a shadow on the ethereal screen of the atmosphere. As the sun sinks below the horizon, the Shadow of the Earth rises in the sky, until it disappears, melting into the sky itself. When you look at the Shadow of the Earth you have the perception of its dimensions, you are conscious of being on it. And when the darkness comes and the curtain of the Southern sky opens you keep remembering you have the Earth behind you shoulders, and you are sitting on it. Although it is just a grain of dust and you sit on that grain, it is your earth, your home. It’s the place from where you watch the universe. And everything disappears, even though you carry with you the history of mankind, the first hominids, the Jurassic fossils, and the primordial soup.”

The Beauty of the Sky

The Shadow of the Earth was premiered on May 22, 2008, well in time for IYA2009. The hope was that it would have been performed again and again during 2009. But this was not the case, for several reasons. However, as time goes by, I feel it was better so. One should never try to repeat such deeply moving experiences, for the attempt would almost certainly turn into disappointment.

If you wish to know more about The Shadow of the Earth, just visit its web site. Follow these links if you want just to see more photos, videos or listen to a selection of music.