Irene Russolillo / Lisi Estaras, The Speech

Irene Russolillo / Lisi Estaras, The Speech, Italian Cultural Institute, June 16

Irene Russolillo in The Speech (photo: Ilaria Costanzo)

It’s the time of year when the nineteenth-century architectural legacy of London looks its best and Belgrave Square, where the Italian Cultural Institute is housed, is no exception. Inside, the evening light filters into the piano nobile where the walls are hung with photographs of some of Rome’s architectural heritage whose influence can be seen in the classical facades outside, while through the grand windows you can almost feel the shade of the plane trees in the Gardens across the street. In the interior grandeur of these architectural traces, standing in a corner as we take our seats, is the figure of Irene Russolillo dressed simply and elegantly in a white summer dress emerging delicately from another consciousness as if our sudden arrival has disturbed her. She inches her way apologetically to the centre of the floor transforming the space by her presence while she silently, slowly forms words with tentative gestures and casts her expressive eyes over the assembled guests. The human scale of the room removes any sense of theatrical perspective so we find ourselves attending a reception at the point at which the beautiful hostess is about to address us with gracious words of welcome. In this setting, The Speech, which Russolillo created with Lisi Estaras, is a slow-motion, thirty-minute recall of all that happens inside her head and body between the intention to speak and its actualization.

In this time Russolillo takes us on a journey through inner realms that are inaccessible but for her eloquent physical articulation of gesture and voice, from sensual disintegration to the turbulence of a body losing control, from nervous apprehension to delirious abandon. There are suggestions of an invisible puppeteer manipulating a doll that has lost some but not all of its strings, or of a patient in a mental asylum, hunched, turned in and dazed. Her voice is at times as fragile as her body, catching in her throat or refusing to enunciate, and at others emerging with such power and clarity that her open mouth, wild hair and dark eyes extrapolate it into surreal territory. But however fragmented or fractured these inner realms may be, Russolillo summons them with a strength that belies their fragility. She improvises much of this within a structure and rhythm that fuse the portrayal of inner realms into a unified portrait as vivid and as poignant as a ripped and mended photograph.

There are two principal threads in The Speech, one textual and the other aural; the text is an adaptation of Édouard Levé’s book, Autoportrait, which has been described as ‘a series of declarative sentences…all ostensibly about Levé himself…lacking any discernable order…contained within one book-length paragraph.’ Here is a basis for the fractured nature of The Speech. Similarly, in Spartaco Cortesi’s sound processing, a song threads its way through the work, at first with barely audible notes. It fades away and returns again in another form; Russolillo sings the words and translates them in both English and Italian (with a voluble bias towards the latter) but by the time it manifests towards the end of the work in a version with a full-blown reverberating beat, it is her exuberant dancing that fills the room like a music video on steroids.

In a work like The Speech, it is very difficult to sense where it is going to end, for the beginning and end are outside the work’s frame. What is clear is that our hostess never quite arrives at the point of articulating her words, for the journey she has taken leads us only to the moment before she starts. What she has revealed, however, is that the realm of performance is as eloquent and mysterious as an internal process, and that through an artist of her calibre a nineteenth-century room can be transformed into a precarious but nevertheless rapturous human landscape, like those Roman ruins looking out across time from their mute frames.

The Speech was presented at the Italian Cultural Institute by TripSpace Projects