Kashimashi is the new study carried out by the actress and director Natasha Czertok of Teatro Nucleo, born within the framework of a research on the themes of women and gender representation. It was presented with the provisional title of “Private Bestiary” at the festival Altre Visioni Coltano (Pisa), as well as at the Festival Totem Scene Urbane in Pontelagoscuro (Ferrara) and at the International Frauen Theater Festival in Frankfurt.
The title ironically resumes a stereotypical and discriminating use in the Japanese language: Kashimashii means in fact “noisy, chaotic” gift of a traditional perspective that makes a women’s shed as the source of confusion and disorder.
Gender determines our daily actions: gestures, behaviour, social rituals. With the magnifying glass of theatrical research, Natasha Czertok’s “private bestiary” insinuates itself, with a substantial dose of self-irony, into the dynamics linked to what we usually define as “normality” and to the stereotypes in which we recognize ourselves / that we reject / in which we feel compelled.  The world that human beings put into shape in order to be effective in their tendency towards universality necessarily uses a symbolic modality, and it is to these symbols that the performance makes reference. To enrich this look, the director and performer has chosen the “open laboratory” approach, inviting a group of friends and colleagues of different ages, sexes, ethnic and social backgrounds to contribute.
“The responses to my letter were many and varied. Hurried, deep, precise, dubious, critical, amused, unexpected. A vortex of images of different forms and nature. I felt in most of the people to whom I sent my request a strong commitment, a push to get involved, a desire to be there. We had just beaten the lockdown and this perhaps added an extra boost”.
All the sound environments are designed by Vincenzo Scorza, an attentive “sound sculptor” who knows how to introduce very different elements into his patterns, sometimes discordant, with strange and refined results that accompany and complete the actions, contributing to the creation of a kaleidoscope of creatures that come to life on different levels: dramaturgical, choreographic and symbolic. The scene is almost naked, a chair, a few cardboard boxes from which ordinary everyday objects come out – the fan, the balloon, the cigarette pack – that bring on stage the different stereotypes, or creatures, strange beasts that then become characters, but also facets of one woman’s personality. One woman that merges all women into one, every day, each and every moment of their lives.