Isabella Rossellini at Rubix Festival in Montenegro

The Rubix festival, held for the second time in Porto Montenegro, in Tivat, represents an innovative and provocative combination of all branches, expressions and forms of art. Like a Rubik’s cube, everything here is assembled and disassembled with great talent and skill in the various colours of contemporary artistic expressions and movements. This year, Isabella Rossellini enriched the theatre program with a performance called Darwin’s Smile. It is a monodrama that unites contrasting worlds, unfolds the question of the origin of humanity, opens what is the most deeply rooted in us, our archetypes, connects them with innovative ideas, and directly represents a method of acting.

With the theory of evolution, its understanding of human origin and the concept of natural selection, Charles Darwin laid the foundations of modern biology. Studying the similarities between modern human and animal species, he concluded that facial movements, body gestures, sounds and other physiological changes which accompany the expression of emotions are mostly instinctive and that they are the remains of behavioural modifications that occurred from our animal ancestors.

Isabella builds her show, which she performs worldwide, based on the artistic and scientific knowledge that a smile is universal for all people. Emotion is constant. That is where the title of the performance of the famous actress Rossellini comes from, who, in addition to her artistic career, also has a master’s degree in biology. A smile as a prelude to laughter is followed by laughter in art, as the only positive character, for example, in the comedies of N.V. Gogol. According to the evolutionist theory, humans arose from monkeys, conversely, in art in Gogol’s play The Government Inspector, for example, only pig snouts remain of human faces. What is also happening is the monumental Human Comedy (Balzac) or, again, the famous Orwell’s menagerie of Animal Farm. The unusual combination of science and art in the conceptual interpretation of Isabella Rossellini reveals new and uncommon possibilities and refines them with her artistic approach. She is an actress, she is a seagull, she is a reflection of Chekhov’s theatre, and at the same time, she is a lively revealer of the mysticism, symbolism and logic of a free bird on stage through a scientific prism. She will take off like Icarus, she will be the raven from Poe, a black and white swan by Mallarme and Tchaikovsky as well, Ibsen’s wild duck, and Baudelaire’s albatross.

The theoretical aspect of the play is not only related to biology. The principles of Stanislavski’s System permeate the stage performance. The art of an actor’s experience, subconscious reaction, behaviour and interpretation, as well as the inner response expressed through emotions – are a reflection of the famous acting method that the great actress Rossellini (daughter of the equally great actress Ingrid Bergman) knows very well. It is her own personal biology, genetic and artistic background.

Retrospection and analysis in the anthropomorphic and theatrical spectrum study animal behaviour and acting identity. The misunderstanding between life and art resolves itself at the performance stage. Rossellini changes costumes like a wolf – his coat, she, as an actress, treats gestures, movements, expressions and approaches magnificently, transforming herself from a caterpillar to a butterfly with every line, gesture and movement.

Isabella Rossellini at Rubix festival. Photo by Miloš Krstić

The visual expression of the performance breaks conservative theatre norms. In addition to traditional acting techniques, Isabella Rossellini sets colourful digital effects. There is a camera on the stage, with which, as well as with the audience, she talks in parallel. On the film screen in the background, a mosaic of photos of her as a child, as a young actress and model alternates, as well as a live broadcast of the current performance. Some of the first photographs taken on the first cameras, portraits of Darwin, depictions of animals and archival footage of the beginnings of film art speak of the deep roots of humans, the author and the seventh art. With her example, she explains the beauty of emotion in the eye of the beholder through stage scenes and the camera eyepiece. Using the Kuleshov effect, new parallels are revealed throughout the performance, but the emotion and secret of Darwin’s smile is not in the montage technique, but in the blue velvet seen through the actress’s tears.

The human has taken off his fur, now he is completely naked to the rhythm of Juliette Gréco’s song Déshabillez-moi. The actress took off her costume and mask revealing the actor’s anatomy to the audience. Darwin’s theory in Isabella Rossellini’s interpretation challenged art. In an artistic world, a snake ate an elephant, Gregor Samsa really turned into an insect one morning, and in Ionesco’s city, rhinoceroses roam the streets. While science tells us that we came from animals, literature shows us that we are transforming into animals. Isabella Rossellini achieves a balance with her performance, finding the soul in science and the system in art.