DIDO

With Dido the long performative and visual project inspired by the works of Ovid is completed: after Radical Change, Chaos ed Exile, free creations taken from Le Metamorfosi and Tristia, Lenz Rifrazioni innate la own visionary poetry on the letter of the heroes, to artistically rework the figure of Dido, the suicide queen, classic icon of sentimental extremism exalted in the works of Guido Reni, Rubens, Tiepolo, Vouet, Lorrain and protagonist of Henry Purcell's opera “Dido & Aeneas”, Baroque musical masterpiece. Ovid dedicates one of the twenty-one imaginary love letters that make up the Heroides to her in which the queen writes to Aeneas - indicated by the gods as the future founder of Rome – in a vain attempt to convince him not to abandon her. The escape of Aeneas who abandons Dido, tearing away her soul and pushing her to suicide, seems to prelude the future horrors that fascist Italy will bring to Africa with the conquest of Ethiopia in 1936. Not by chance, Indeed, in the 1930s within the reappropriation of the myth of the Roman Empire for the use of Mussolini's rhetoric, Dido is demonized as a woman symbol of the prey continent.
Dido represents the mythical body of Africa, conquered, enjoyed and abandoned by the Western hero Aeneas, founder of Rome and the new empire. And Carthage itself, the city founded by Dido, it is according to the myth, defined and circumscribed by animal skin, subtle and vulnerable. Skin, body, cute, they become red with passions, tremors and pains under the gaze of desire of Aeneas's senescent Latinity.
Dido's installation project places the relationship between the performing subjects at the center of creation, a woman-child and an old man. On her own body the little girl founds a sentimental city governed by cutaneous laws, not conditioned by authoritative acts, exclusively ordered by the epidermal norm of the disease. The old man's body, physics of the civic-ideological hospice of the West, residual somatics of classicism, he heroicizes himself in the epic pomp of pius, respectful of divine will, of laws and duties towards the State, before which the need of the individual disappears.
Ovid's text, intertwined with references from The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage by Christopher Marlowe, Leonce und Lena by Georg Büchner and from Canto V of Dante Alighieri's Inferno, takes shape through a layered film score, stratified, created in the archaeological site of Carthage in Tunisia and in Cartagena in Spain, which returns geographic-emotional maps, poetic visions that expand the performative action and invade the scenic space, refracting the primary dramaturgical nuclei of the tragic myth.

Images write verses.
The images recreate the geography of the world,
the sails sway from passion to reason following the waves of time and Dido is reborn, like a new Phoenix, from the ashes of the fire.
Dido today, painted black, picture of the present that reflects the past, recent history and coming history, pregnant woman committed suicide by her lover who fled for the virile task. Fertilize a new homeland that gives birth to the empire, the new boundary of the global world and individual thought. The images bounce, like pinball balls, hitting sound targets of things that happened, present and future. Youth, youth: the makeup covers the black that was on the white with white, what was once black is black. The empty skulls of the infernal hosts, the flying skulls, they remember that lost ages and loves never reappear from the sea again.
Mediterranean, in the middle of the lands
to shipwreck promises, goodbye, come back.

give Epistulae Heroidum di Publius Ovidius Nasone
The tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage by Christopher Marlowe
Leonce and Lena di Georg Büchner
Inferno (Divine Comedy) by Dante Alighieri
creation | Maria Federica Masters | Francesco Pititto
translation | playwriting | imagoturgy | Francesco Pititto
installation | plastic elements | regia | Maria Federica Masters
musica | Andrea Azzali_Monophon
interpreters | Valentina Barbarini | Joseph Barigazzi
luci | Davide Cavandoli
production | Lenz Refractions
project in residence at the Párraga Center in Murcia (Spain)

Dido_part 1

Dido_part 2

Left by Aeneas in despair: <<Dido>> come l’ Africa
By Valeria Ottolenghi, 23 June 2010

He inspired poets, painters, sculptors, musicians Dido queen abandoned by the Trojan hero who destiny called elsewhere, she committed suicide in the fire while the sails carried her beloved away. But in the <<Dido>> di Lenz, inspired by Ovid, with other poetic fragments – also Dante – this female figure, dark colored skin, ends up representing the entire African continent and Aeneas the white conqueror (many precise references to Mussolini and the colonial enterprise), albeit in a more complex dialectic of metamorphoses and exchanges. The bodies confront each other, often in their exposed nakedness, also due to age, he is older, and for the color, in complex games of multiple reflections.
Preview of Lenz's new creation, now presented in Parma as part of Parmapoesia, <<Dido>> – by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, interpreters Valentina Barbarini and Giuseppe Barigazzi, music by Andrea Azzali – crosses time and history, with films that also show ports and cities of the present.
High transparent walls. She plays with a tire. The images – always of a special preciousness – show fragility, she evokes the lost gaze of resigned desolation in African poverty, him the years that passed, the body remembers many decades. Some of her postures are particularly beautiful, which appears almost sculpture in the shots, the body as if elongated.
Disguises. And sexuality is also a reason for reflection, of identity exchange. She will smear herself with white powder and kiss him, lips red, who in the meantime had painted his hair black: possible metamorphoses? There doesn't seem to be a psychological dimension but a truly planetary one.
The multiplied videos also flow on the ground. She will have a book in her hand while the presence of fire is felt. City to build with colored blocks. Finally, the woman, with the head of a bull, it won't recognize that pile of green plastic as food. Men and women are/we are inextricably linked, past and present, black and white, states and continents, young and old: and with <<Dido>> Lenz seemed to feel the dark feeling of desperation intensely.

Lenz, last act with Dido
By Giuseppe Liotta, Hystrio 1.2011

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