Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed

In his Manifesto of Futurism (1909), Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of the Futurist movement, set out his vision. He envisioned a world driven by conflict, aggression and movement. He wrote, 'We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene.' Driven by the technological developments of the time

and their unbridled enthusiasm for war, the Futurists moved in the direction of rising fascism, which they embraced. What is most remarkable about the brutal ideas of the Futurists is that they still appeal to many people today. The American puppeteer Dan Hurlin based his new performance Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed on four never-before-performed one-act plays, originally written by the Futurist Fortunato Depero in 1917. 

The four plays are: Suicidi e omicidi acrobatici (Acrobatic Suicides and Homicides), Ladro automatico (Automatic Thief), Avventura elettrica (Electric Adventure) and Sicuro (Safe). They are a short story about grief that turns into the death urge, a comedy about a hypnotist-cum-thief, a thriller about adulterous lovers, and a bizarre object ballet.

Depero was an Italian writer, designer and painter. In 1914, while living in Rome, he joined the Futurists. He later moved to New York, where he designed theatre sets and costumes, before returning to Italy in the 1930s. There, he worked as a designer for the company Campari. Depero wanted to break down the borders between high and low art. In 1918, with writer Gilbert Clavel, he created I Balli Plastici (The Plastic Ballet). As well as an important development in puppet theatre, I Balli Plastici was also a significant step towards the futuristic ideal of a theatre that was completely free of human actors and in which machines played the main roles. The four one-scene plays from 1917 form a preliminary study for this major work. They lay forgotten for a long time. 

Until 2013, when Dan Hurlin stumbled across documents that referred to the existence of the four puppet plays during a stay at the American Academy in Rome. Hurlin, an acclaimed director and puppeteer with the performance Hiroshima Maiden (2004) to his name, was immediately interested. He set out to find them in Rovereto, Depero's home village at the foot of the Alps. There, in Depero's personal archive, he found a box with papers full of stage directions: the four one-act plays. Four plays without any dialogue and without drawings or descriptions of the puppets. Hurlin was delighted. Now he was able to design his own puppets. These were angular cubic figures in bright colours, without facial expressions: more robot than human. 

Depero's scripts reveal his background as a designer. The plot is often secondary to image and movement. Hurlin and the puppeteers on stage make use of video projections (Tom Lee), Bunraku (Japanese puppet theatre) and miniature sets to carry out the almost endless flow of sometimes impossible stage directions, from moving tables and steps to floating puppets and flying lifts. There is also a narrator (Jennifer Kidwell) who reads out the stage directions, as well as ominous music by Dan Moses Schreier. 

Violence and death are recurring themes in these plays. The puppets are either victims or offenders. A woman jumps off a staircase to her death, two lovers quarrel and tear each other's eyes out, a figure with a huge rifle commits a bloody assault. Everyone ends up dead. Initially, the contrast between the violent matter and the innocent-looking puppets is still large, which is something to laugh about. Slowly but surely, however, once it is clear that there is no way of escaping the horror, the smiles are wiped off the faces of the audience. Hurlin succeeds in bringing this hundred-year-old play back to life in a miraculous way.