THE IMMINENT PAST

The philosophical-theological baroque drama perfectly represents the thematic question that headlines the entire project: the imminent past. The Farnesian monument between the historical period and the contemporary, the dramaturgy that isolates life and dreams in the same space-time (and viceversa) and the relationship between urban space, collective fruition and active memory configure a hypothetical framework of synthesis and project for the capital of the future. The perception of individual time through multiple artistic forms (installation in space, video projected images, live performance, baroque musical dramaturgy, modern and contemporary) favors that common time – together with the common space, the city – necessary to outline community identity and new perspectives.

The Pilotta Monumental Complex can represent that common space that hosts the different times of collective and individual history, as an inclusive hub for the different souls of the Polis . They will be able to actively participate in the project, through practical workshops, students of the Toschi artistic high school and other schools in the city, of the Arrigo Boito Conservatory and the various choirs, of the University (the University of Parma is a supporting member of the Lenz Foundation), of the students of the Cinema District as documentarians of the entire experience. Each construction phase will make use of advanced technological systems that will document the work in progress, particularly for site-specific, The most advanced video and sound representation techniques will be used.

To introduce the creation of The life And Dream three performances were created, which will have some fundamental characters of the work as protagonists:

• the father (Basilio – played by Rocco Caccavari) who in the large Reading Room of the Palatine Library will seek the scientific reasons for his cruelty towards his Son;

• the Beloved (Rosaura – played by Sandra Soncini) which in the Guazzatoio Courtyard will give body and voice to its hybrid nature of male and female together;

• the Servant and Prince (Clarino/Sigismondo – embodied by Barbara Voghera) in constant flight from the only certain thing in Life, the death.

Yes The life And Dream The protagonist – Prince Sigismund – excluded from birth without fault from human society, since destined by an astral plan to be evil, he lives locked up in a tower. The Father-King to have the certainty that the Son is capable of pursuing good, and therefore to succeed him to the throne, puts the young Prince to the test of the world.

Temporarily reinstated, through artificial sleep, in the social game he will have to be able to overturn his dark destiny, but unable to control instincts and desires, to exercise appropriate behavior towards authority, to comply with the regulations, of rules and laws, to perceive the difference between good and evil, he will be sentenced again to imprisonment and social exclusion.

Only the People, in open conflict with the King's decisions, he will be able to see the true nature of the Prince and will take him to the head of the army to overthrow the power of the old Father. The violence of reality absolves guilt, dissolves the conflict by restoring hierarchies and putting an end to the dream of revolution.

The spatial transposition of multiple conceptual fields, emotional, morals manifested in the various and contrasting psychic states of the protagonist in the different parts of the Pilotta Monumental Factory, it will give plastic volume to the dramaturgical oscillation between reality and dream, between freedom and constraint, between will and destiny.

Sensitive actors will be called to interpret the complexity of the work, child actors, historical actors from Lenz and pre-artistic personalities of great human and intellectual depth, symbolic figures of the civil and political history of the city of Parma.

Through multiple artistic forms – installations, performance, video projections, baroque musical dramaturgy, modern and contemporary – this disturbing dimension, noisy, disorganica, disheveled, it expands beyond the boundaries of the subject and transfuses into a new common time free from conventions and social norms, necessary to imagine, or to dream, as in the case of the young protagonist, a possible poetic and political transformation of collective identity.

FEBRUARY_APRIL 2020

SENSITIVITY WORKSHOPS’ 

Theatrical workshops at Lenz Teatro aimed at staging and studying the installation project of the show Life is a dream:

1. Permanent laboratory psychic sensitivity project

addressed to:

• guests Multifunctional Center P. Corsini di Pellegrino P.se
• guests Community Accommodation Apennines of Pellegrino P.se
• guests of the therapeutic-rehabilitative communities of Parma
• actors ensemble Lenz
• actors sensitive ensemble Lenz

2. Autism Laboratory

addressed to:

people with pervasive developmental disorders and cognitive difficulties

3. Kids Laboratory

addressed to:

children of the children's and youth choir Ars Canto

4. Contemporary Performative Environments Laboratory

addressed to:

UNIPR students and secondary schools and Officina Cinema

MARCH APRIL 2020 

THEMATIC SHOWS

Shows at Lenz Teatro in preparation for the project Life is a dream debuting in June 

OTHER STATE
and Life is a dream by Calderón de la Barca
Translation, playwriting, imagoturgy | Francesco Pititto
Regia, installation, costumes | Maria Federica Masters
Musica | Claudius Rocchetti
Interpreter | Barbara Voghera
In collaboration with Castello dei Burattini

FLOWERS LIKE STARS?
and The constant prince by Calderón de la Barca
Translation, playwriting, imagoturgy | Francesco Pititto
Regia, installation, costumes | Maria Federica Masters
Musica | Andrew Azzali
Interpreter | Valentina Barbarini

VIOLENT HIPPOGRIPH
{ My Violent Hippogriff }
and The life is dreamby Calderón de la Barca
Translation, playwriting, imagoturgy | Francesco Pititto
Regia, installation, costumes | Maria Federica Masters
Musica | Claudius Rocchetti
Interpreter | Sandra Soncini

DIALOGUES AND SEMINARS 

March 2020_date to be defined

On the occasion of the debut of Other State, first national conference on Accessibility and Art in the context of the actions of the European project Europe Beyond Access 2018_2022. 

MAY JUNE 2020

SETUP AND PILOT SHOWS

4 May_15 June 2020

Tests at the Pilotta Complex

16_27 June 2020 (break 21/22 June)

Shows at the Pilotta Complex

Ore 18 violent hypogryph_Cortile del Guazzatoio

Ore 19 Asylum_Palatine Library

Ore 21 Life is a dream_Pilotta Complex

DIALOGUES AND SEMINARS 

June 2020_date to be defined

Campo Lenz, public meeting on creation Life is a dream

NOVEMBER 2020

INTERNATIONAL PERFORMING ARTS FESTIVAL

1_30 November 2020

WOMEN IN ART

International performing arts festival Nature Gods Theatres, with residencies and the debut of international productions which includes the exclusive presence of female artists.

DIALOGUES AND SEMINARS

November 2020_date to be defined

On the occasion of the international performing arts festival Nature Gods Theatres, second international conference on Accessibility and Art in the context of the actions of the European project Europe Beyond Access 2018_2022.

THE GREAT THEATER IN THE WORLD
Video installation + performance
da Calderón de la Barca
Text and imagery | Francesco Pititto
Installation, costumes and direction | Maria Federica Masters
Interpreters | Barbara Voghera, Paolo Maccini, Franck Berzieri, Carlotta Spaggiari, Valeria Meggi, Matthew Castellazzi, Sandra Soncini, Lara Bonvini, Valentina Barbarini, Lorenzo Davini, Monica Bianchi and Eugenio Degiacomi (basso)
Musicians | Sarah Ten, Alessandro Trapasso, Luciano D'Orazio, Alessio Zanfardino, Francesco Monica and Francesco Melani, harpsichordists directed by Maestro Francesco Baroni
Electronic musical composition and re-elaboration | Claudius Rocchetti
Treatment | Elena Sorbi
Organization | Ilaria Stocchi
Press and communication office | Michele Pascarella
Technical care | Alice Scartapacchio
Media video | Stephen Cacciani

*

THE LIFE IS DREAM
auto sacramental
Video installation + performance
Da Calderón de la Barca
Text and imagery | Francesco Pititto
Installation, costumes and direction | Maria Federica Masters
Musica | Claudius Rocchetti
Performer | Sandra Soncini, Franck Berzieri, Paolo Maccini (Ensemble Lenz Foundation); Matthew Castellazzi, Lorenzo Davini, Martina Gismondi, Agatha Pelosi, Margherita Picchi, Jade Vaccaro (Ars Canto Association) and Giuseppina Cattani, Mary Garden, Elena Nunziata, Mirella Pongolini, Cesare Quintavalla, Valeria Spocci
Site-specific project for the Pilotta Monumental Complex in Parma
Treatment | Elena Sorbi
Organization | Ilaria Stocchi
Production assistant | Loredana Scianna
Press and communication office | Michele Pascarella
Technical care | Alice Scartapacchio
Production | Lenz Foundation

With the aim of monitoring the progress of the initiative and evaluating the impact on the territory e, at the same time, to stimulate an improvement of the organization itself in the continuity of the know-how relating to the projects, in the long-term development of the benefits brought by financing, in increasingly professionalized and autonomous management skills and in the qualification of skills; for the 2018_2020 project THE IMMINENT PAST Lenz Foundation identifies the following macro-objectives.

The monitoring actions are conducted by the Lenz Foundation staff in collaboration with the entities most involved in the project (AUSL of Parma, Coop. Dawn House). A new collaboration is being activated with the University of Parma in the person of Prof. Isabella Mozzoni which will allow Lenz, from 2020, to activate specific paths that involve the direct involvement of university students for the monitoring/evaluation of the projects and the analysis of the public.

1. SOCIAL INTEGRATION

1.A The exaltation of marginality in Lenz's artistic creation marks a fundamental step for the rebirth of contemporary performative language, statutory objective in short-term planning, medium and long term of the Foundation. The inclusion of people with disabilities, or usually excluded from artistic knowledge, as actors with high professional skills, as well as increasing well-being and creating a sense of community, has an impact in the fight against stigma and in the diffusion of the use of cultural means for the promotion of social cohesion, of the concept of cultural accessibility and mental health.

2.A Improvement of the quality of life of the actors with sensitivity involved in the project through continuity in participation in the laboratory and performance phases, the increase in disabled/professional relations, the fight against stigma through the involvement of the public in shows that aim to enhance the beauty and expressive uniqueness of people with sensitivity in places normally intended for "cultured" use.

2. INVOLVEMENT OF YOUNG GENERATIONS

Loyalty of the school public, university and under 30 through the expansion of specific projects:

– promotions aimed at a young audience advertised on online and offline channels more easily reachable by an audience of students/under 30

– organization of the university laboratory Contemporary Performative Environments, created with the University of Parma, aimed at exploring the aspects related to the installation and staging of the shows of the IL PASSATO IMMINENTE 2018_2020 project at the Pilotta Complex.

3. ENHANCEMENT OF YOUNG ARTISTS

Lenz Foundation, reality structured in the territory for over 30 years, intends to encourage generational turnover and the creative potential of young talents, by tutoring and in residence artists capable of activating real transformative interactions with the territory and the community, including in the artistic program productions created in collaboration with young artists/technicians/organizers, and increasing the number of co-productions made with young European artists.

4. ENHANCEMENT OF ELDERLY ARTISTS

Lenz Foundation also intends to encourage a shift in attention to the existential condition of the "third age of life", enhancing the experience potential of older people 60, in the condition of exaltation of the cultural talent developed during a full existence that wishes to deal without limitations with the artistic dimension. The desired aim is to spread a conception of "elderly age" as fulfilling and desirable on a personal and community level, enhancing its enrichment aspects rather than its deficit aspects.

5. PROMOTE THE DEVELOPMENT OF NETWORK PROJECTS

Develop the system of cultural relations and services through the strengthening of territorial networks, national and international. Expand production possibilities, promotion and communication of the IL PASSATO IMMINENTE 2018_2020 project by optimizing the resources globally available through processes of activation of services in aggregate form.

6. ENHANCE THE DIFFUSION OF PROJECTS AND KNOWLEDGE OF THE TERRITORY AT NATIONAL LEVEL THROUGH A SUSTAINABLE CULTURAL COMMUNICATION PROJECT

Increase visibility on the local and national territory and encourage the "post-production/refraction" work of the project through constant dialogue conducted with exponents of the new generation of Italian critics, invited to produce and publish writings and to discuss with Lenz during the study seminar in June 2020 at the Pilotta Monumental Complex.

7. IMPROVE THE ABILITY TO ATTRACT RESOURCES AND INCREASE THE LONG-TERM SUSTAINABILITY OF THE PROJECT

Develop the city's live entertainment system by increasing resources from the private sector. Promote activities to raise companies' awareness of the topic of cultural production, fundamental for the renewal of the territory's offer and a strategic element for the economy linked to quality tourism. Increase in relations with banking foundations through participation in tenders, maintenance and expansion of sponsorships, development of the Art Bonus system.

THE GREAT THEATER IN THE WORLD – teaser

THE GREAT THEATER IN THE WORLD – full video

THE LIFE IS DREAM – teaser

THE LIFE IS DREAM – whole wheat

THE GREAT THEATER IN THE WORLD

It arouses a whirlwind of emotions. Physics, mental, spiritual. And of visions, which open the gaze and solicit resonances of memories and words, of places and stories, of past and present. Between dizziness of light and shadow, touches the heart and mind. It envelops us and involves us, spatially and internally, like a big hug that contains everyone and everything.
Giuseppe Distefano, Artribute

Once again Lenz animates the hidden and unconfessed of the place and makes it the main source of light […] For Pititto and Maestri the Farnesian monument is the dramaturgy that encloses life and dreams in the same space-time, between historical period and contemporaneity, individual enjoyment and collective memory. An encyclopedic embrace of differences, of the possibilities of the human being. With eyes closed wide open.
Matteo Brighenti, Double zero

It is a show that is at times moving and at times funny in its paradoxes and the replication of age-old patterns, in the irony of fate, in the roulette of roles […] And it's truly thrilling to be able to enter these spaces outside of opening hours, glimpse paintings “burned” by the headlights that illuminate the actors' positions and discover very strong shadows, watching characters so convincing that they seem to have materialized out of these oils on canvas after almost 400 years.
Matteo Bergamini, Exibart

A vision capable of drying up the baroque charms of the literary place from which it originates, as of the physical place where it took new shape, to give us an alienated dramaturgical evocation in whose interstices, between variegated and reiterating visual projections, the sharp interventions of the sound compositions and electronic reworkings of Claudio Rocchetti flashed, with the alienating counterpoint of the various harpsichords scattered throughout the stage space.
Alessandro Rigolli, Music Journal

Lenz, while preferring aesthetic research, is characterized by a rigorous political connotation, etymologically speaking, which abandons the spectacularization of theater for tours and large audiences to reactivate the history of abandoned places, of outcast humanity, of the neglected tradition, without however waving the flag of urban regeneration, of social theater or the updating of the classics.
Giulio Sleep, Paper Street

Pititto and Maestri propose the distortion of a metatheater as a gravitational space in which individuals are structured as elementary particles, whose motion is constant, casual and necessarily led to the meeting/clash, and whose narrative is not flat and continuous, maformed from the interaction and only exclusively through it.
Daniele Rizzo, Persinsala

A directorial-dramaturgical practice that manages to create a synthesis of disturbing beauty, as oriented by the alchemistic instinct of “a union of opposites”, in a release of occult energies, latent […] This work by Calderón-Pititto is a theatrical thought of sacred and simple solemnity, which regulates the entrance of the actors on stage with the opening of two doors: the cradle and the grave.
Franco Acquaviva, Curtain

Calderón de la Barca makes the dream dimension a path of moral purification. Pititto and Maestri use it to propose a thought similar to that which Polonius formulates observing Hamlet's "madness": There is method in the madness that is our existence.
Enrico Piergiacomi, Theater and Criticism

An event of extreme expressive refinement on an ideational and implementation level, three main stages, "stations" of knowledge as in a sacred representation […] superb multiplication of theater within theatre.
Valeria Ottolenghi, The Gazzetta di Parma

THE LIFE IS DREAM

Bodies harnessed in costumes that seem, not by chance, to be instruments of restraint – bodies of elderly singing actors, of rendered actorssensitive from having gone through mental disability, emphasized by the comparison with youth.
Gianni Manzella, the poster

Some sequences have poignant emotional strength. Like that of the Man and his double Child who touch each other and touch each other's faces, the hands, mirroring each other […] Finally a small tricycle advances, carried by a woman. The Child climbs onto it. Walking backwards through the long hall, return to the starting point, stopping in front of the pile of rags, ashen and shapeless mass from which he had emerged.[more]
Giuseppe Distefano, Artribute

The allegorical aspects are absorbed by the truth of the bodies: a moving and emotional show. Maestri and Pititto reread Calderón de la Barca's best-known text between painful monologues and aesthetic vortices.
Valeria Ottolenghi, Journal of Parma

I dig into the text as a reinvention of ancient words and memories, metabolized into dreamlike scenarios that speak to the soul crevasses of the present.
Massimo Marino, Corriere della Sera – Bologna

The spectator is free to move around the exhibition rooms left in dim light and to discover the characters of the drama initially crouched and motionless in their dark niches. Then the music: insinuating, fragmented, persuasive, dissonant and painful.[more]
Emanuela Zanon, Juliet – Contemporary Art Magazine

InThe life is dream – auto sacramental(2019) – second chapter of the three-year site-specific project Il Passato Imminente – the exchange between seventeenth-century paintings and images of reality is a dazzling fact.[more]
Petra Chiodi, Exibart

Everything flows inexorably under the Caravaggio-esque lights that carve the figures giving them a strange and unnatural consistency. What remains are those hospital beds that welcome old and young people united by a common infirmity linked to human action/suffering.[more]
Enrico Pastore, Rumor(s)cena

The installation, Therefore, is the strong point of thisauto sacramental That, leads the protagonist through allegorical images, l’everyman and the spectator through ever deeper and more painful states of knowledge.
Simona M. Frigerio, Trajectories

Applause for the clear and flawless installation made up of hospital beds that take on different functions throughout the story.
Luciano Uggé, Persinsala

Thanks to the Lenz Foundation for dreaming of such a poetic show and a barrier-free way of working. Thank you for placing us once again before the abyss.
Ignacio Garcia, Director of the Almagro Festival (Spain)

The conduct of this work, his way of putting the spaces of the Pilotta into shape, to coordinate interpreters who are so different from each other and so concretely – so creaturely – present, It really seemed extremely interesting to me.
Salvatore Tedesco, University of Palermo

What interests Lenz Fondazione is to narrate the birth, the growth and dying of Man, asking the assembled spectators some fundamental questions, much bigger than them.[more]
Enrico Piergiacomi, Liminatheaters

The game with infinity, everything for everything by Francesco Pititto and Maria Federica Maestri, it is a stage that inhabits the gift of making gravity poetry.[more]
Matteo Brighenti, PAC – paneacquaculture

here it matters little that the so-called "sensitive actor" knows how to re-quote those verses, lose them or reinvent them, because at that moment he is opening up a glimpse of vision that has little to do with the show intended as a test and exhibition of talent. Here we really pretend.[more]
Giulio Sleep, Paper Street

MiBACT_Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism

Emilia Romagna region

Municipality of Parma

Pilotta Monumental Complex

AUSL of Parma Integrated Mental Health Care Department - Pathological Addictions

Monteparma Foundation

Cariparma Foundation

Crédit Agricole Italia banking group

University of Parma

Arrigo Boito Conservatory of Parma

Ars Canto cultural promotion association

Cinema District_Audiovisual Arts Workshop

Cervantes Institute

AuroraDomus Cooperativa Sociale Onlus

Multifunctional Center P. Corsini

Apennine Accommodation Community

Chiesi Farmaceutici

Link AW