Shows

The Bacchae by Euripides

Directed by Riccardo Massai

Architectures textiles and costumes Lietta Cavalli

Vocal choir by Gabriella Bartolomei

Original music: Jonathan Faralli 

With: Sabina Cesaroni, Caterina Cidda, Piera Dabizzi, Rosanna Gentili, Samuel Osman, Bianca Papafava, Chiara Renzi, Simone Rovida,  Rosa Sarti

A tragedy darkened by overcast and leaden skies, where what we hear and see belong to a primitive, archaic culture, echoes of choruses that come from the distant past.

We are confronted with our fear of the unknown, the clash between laity and religion, the presence of contradictions, so it is not easy to talk about and to encapsulate the Dionysiac, to enunciate the infinite topics and the antinomies of The Bacchae.

Everybody loses: Pentheus by refusing his other-than-self, Agave and the women by having entirely become instruments in the hands of the god, and Dionysus himself, arrived to impose his rites, by recurring to the very human instruments of vengeance thus revealing his demi-god imperfection. 

Dionysus’s smile slowly infects us, until suddenly and surprisingly the atrocities bring a smile to our face, and we become full of his contradictions, and we learn the catharsis, the teaching of tragedy: ecstasy can be the frail balance reached in every-day life, in the absence of our excesses.

The vocal choruses, curated by Gabriella Bartolomei, are stories of moments in the secular times about what happened, and is still happening: they are sounds, focal moments that, as the myth tells us, still exist. They are a sound, an echo, a mirror in time that reflects fragments; echoes in the apparent stillness of the matter that remembers them, and is there to listen to them.

The open mouth does not articulate: it has already done so and will do so in another language in the future, so it remains open for the senses: the Suspension where everything happens, the memory that contemplates.

Sogno Rosso - Sotto il segno di Ifigenia - (Red Dream – under the sign of Iphigenia) 

Directed by Elisabetta Pogliani and Paola Zecca

With: Marta Bevilacqua (Ifigenia) Valeria De Michele (Crisotemi) Luca Iervolino (Oreste) Elisabetta

Pogliani (Clitennestra) Rosario Sparno (Agamennone - Cassandra) Paola Zecca (Elettra)

Choreography Marta Bevilacqua

Lights: Fausto Bonvini

The choice of exploring in depth Greek tragedy stems from the love for Francis Bacon, his art and thought. He led us to Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Bacon, an explorer of man’s obscure meanders, was able to elevate pain from the particular of its subjectivity to the universal of every man’s condition. Refusing any narrative form he managed to capture humanity in its tragic condition, exposing the paradox of human existence, so terrible, so magnificent.

Power and passion tear to pieces the great dynasties of ancient Greece. Iphigenia, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Electra, Chrysothemis and Orestes tell the great story of a great family during a great war. They suffer, each one in their place, in the continuously repeating scene of a story that never stops to reiterate itself, where each episode is nothing more than a variation on the theme of power and suffering. They fear, they suffer, they beat and are beaten, they fall under the blows of those closest to them. Everyone suffers for themselves and the others. Everyone kills and gets killed. Everyone spins the thread that makes the individual’s destiny like everybody else’s.

The performance starts with Iphigenia as the innocent victim who’s going to be sacrificed for the war. A father, Agamemnon, in the name of the reason of state and of his ambition, is not able to listen to his heart’s reasons, and does not oppose himself to the sacrifice of his first-born. From this situation, a spiral of crimes and vendettas tells us stories of relationships, clashes, life and death. The characters’ actions are based on individual motivations that carry values that are absolutely universal: the lust for power and vengeance, hate and eroticism, jealousy, filial piety, the aspiration towards justice and liberty. All their terrors are still within us. These violent emotional states upset and disturb us, they are stronger than us, they draw us in unknown frescoes, to which we, being lost, try to give a name, as if by only naming them we could deceive ourselves that we can contain their unavoidable manifestation.

E un diamante brillò - Omaggio a Diamante Medaglia Faini (And a diamond glittered – tribute to Diamante Medaglia Faini)

Written and directed by Aldo Parolini

Actress - Anna De Rosa

Dance -  Natascia Medaglia

Original music by Daniela Savoldi

The play – And a diamond glittered – is intended to be a tribute to the historical figure of the eighteenth-century poet and woman of letters, Diamante Medaglia Faini. She was born in 1724 in Mura in the Savallese area, Valle Sabbia (Brescia), and died in 1770 in Soiano del Garda, Brescia.

She was an extraordinary woman for her times, member of the most prestigious academies of the era: the Unanimi of Salò, the Agiati of Rovereto, the Ricovrati of Padua and the Arcadia in Rome. She studied in depth literature, Latin, French, history, mathematics and philosophy: her Orazione was one of her most memorable achievements. She delivered this speech at the presence of the most illustrious men of letters of her time, on the topic of women’s education and culture.

The play, set in modern times, focuses on the life and works of Diamante Medaglia, avoiding the excesses of rhetoric, to extract the fundamental sense of her cultural and spiritual message, which has been passed on and still today presents itself, in all its noble beauty, as a gift to the new generations.

An actress interprets two characters, in a continuous role play, changing register, giving life now to the noble eighteenth century poet, now to a woman of our times who, as a passionate researcher, delves into the study of the character, to reach a progressive, almost total identification with the long gone intellectual, in a visionary atmosphere created by moving music. In this evolution, a meeting beyond time is foreshadowed, in the discovery of a dimension that reveals itself as being the sublime eternity of the soul that joins together, in the chant of nature and of divine beauty, all human beings.

In collaboration with:

Professor Rebecca Messbarger - Director of Undergraduate Studies in Italian, founder and co-convener of the Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon, and member of the Executive Board of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

www.rebeccamessbarger.com

Tales in Music. Palermo Kabul – Round Trip

narrators: Aram Ghasemy and Paola Mandel

Mouna Amari: Oud (Arabic lute) and voice

Karim Alishahi: setar and tar

Sinan Cem Eroğlu: nay and kaval (flutes)

Orhan Işık: sufi dance and saz

Federico Sanesi: percussions

Thoni Sorano: voice (Turkish, Persian, Sicilian)

director Paola Mandel

lights: Marco D’ Amico

project realised thanks to Fondazione Arbor (Lugano)

In 2007 I had the almost miraculous chance to work in Kabul with some Afghan musicians, and since then I have had the desire to retrace and remember that wealth of poetry, tales, music, or more simply of culture that for centuries linked Europe, the Mediterranean and Asia.

The audience responded well at the play’s debut in November 2010 at the “Le ultime carovane” festival (the last caravans). We took this as further proof that what people from different cultures have in common, exactly because it comes from very far back in the history of mankind, is so profoundly rooted in each one of us that it’s immediately recognised and appreciated by everyone.  

On a background skilfully created by an ensemble of musicians from Italy, Tunisia and Turkey, two actresses tell, in Italian and Persian (with subtitles projected on a screen), stories and tales which echo with their similarities throughout the Mediterranean and all the Oriental world.

Verses sung in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Sicilian are interspersed in and complete the story.

The texts, recited and sung, go from Aesop’s fables to stories that can be found both in Rumi and Boccaccio, from Ibn Hamdis, highest representative of the Arab-Sicilian poetry school, much loved in Sicily for his ability to sing the nostalgia for this island, to more recent and less well-known authors, like the Sicilian poet Ignazio Buttitta.

Usually Oriental musicians play improvising on a modal structure (called maquam in Arabic, muguam in Turkish and raga in India), and this allows for the accompaniment to the story to come alive following the emotions, the rhythms and the ups and downs of the story itself, in a perfect harmony created moment by moment between musicians and actresses.

We also like to remember the story of an unusual instrument like the Marranzano (Jew’s harp), born in the steppe of Central Asia, where it is still used, and that, present in the oldest music of Turkish populations, has now almost completely fallen into disuse in Turkey, while, taken to Sicily by the Normans, it found there a peculiar form of expression.

Arianna - Dance theatre  - NEW PRODUCTION

Written and directed by Aldo Parolini


With: Alessia D'Anna, Silvia Pietta, Marzia Gallo, Sofia Vigliar, Valentina Cesano, Loris Dogana, Giuseppe Nitti, Jacopo Fracasso, Natascia Medaglia, Flavia Fortunati e Giulia Russo.


Choreography: Natascia Medaglia e Aldo Parolini

In Ariadne’s myth we find ourselves in an archaic and mysterious space-time dimension, full of references to archetypical symbols, which still resonate within us, revealing the universal connection between human beings and the images and stories of ancient myth.

In this performance, in the context of a theatrical research aiming at a synthesis of artistic expressions, the actors’ words and actions become one with the dance, movement itself becomes dance, while sound and word merge in a harmonic whole.

The dithyramb announces the coming of the divine Bacchus, of song and festive, orgiastic, ecstatic dance… an extraordinary and uncontainable power, like the most authentic vital euphoria.

Ariadne, the Minotaur, Theseus… a long awaited supreme King; the theatrical performance moves at a relentless pace, increasing and at the same time suspended, dilated within glimpses of imaginary resplendence and moving poetics.