Winners of the Create with Open Data contest, conceived and promoted by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia and Lepida spa as part of the Regional Digital Agenda, the group led by Monica Morini and Bernardino Bonzani will use the language of theatre to interpret the content of the city’s public data sets.
Teatro dell’Orsa brings public data sets to the stage – in other words the figures that describe and record city life, from parks to roundabouts and books. In the theatrical interpretation of the group, led by Monica Morini and Bernardino Bonzani, the contents of data sets are transposed into the language of theatre. This is the winning project of the Create with Open Data contest. We are experiencing a period of history in which data builds genuine architectures of communication, shaping social types; as invisible to the human eye as it is concrete as a presence which guides our way of life. This translation to theatre constitutes a real transposition of languages, from the numerical to the “theatrical”. Above all it draws on creativity to make this reality visible and tangible.
“Transmitting the value of open data to citizens is never an easy task”, says Valeria Montanari, head of Digital Agenda and Participation at Reggio Emilia Municipality, “precisely because of its lack of appeal due to the complexity of the information, with tables, numbers, lists and data sets. Filling the data with human emotion seemed to us an innovative and intelligent way to bring citizens into contact with a numerical reading of the city. Numbers speak, they tell of everyday experiences, they portray actions, plans and our life as a community, day after day. Narrating Reggio Emilia through data means presenting a vision which is objective but also curious, unusual. And data can prove to be a great economic opportunity and a significant act of civic transparency”.
Greeting the audience at the Cavallerizza theatre will be “data people”, played by a group of actors from the Casa delle Storie: men and women who preserve the visible and invisible memory and history of an item of data. On stage will be Monica Morini and Bernardino Bonzani themselves, along with composer and musician Gaetano Nenna and visual artist Michele Ferri, who will interact live with a screen of speaking images created for the occasion by video maker Alessandro Scillitani, who concludes: “Looking at data sets made us see the places of the city in a more poetic way. It’s a tightrope walk, always balancing between what’s merely a list of data and a revelation of endless possibilities: doors opening onto an unknown world”. (from the Italian press release)
Fatti di Numeri, Teatro dell’Orsa Company, Teatro Cavallerizza, Reggio Emilia, Italy, March 4th, 2017, more info here
images (cover 1) Teatro dell’Orsa, Fatti di numeri, photo: Alessandro Scillitani
