HAMLET

H = 277 LB (Hamlets project) from Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Assessment: Maria Federica Masters, Francesco Pititto. View: Francesco Pititto. Transducer: Vincent Salemi. Sound acquisition system: Andrew Azzali.
Bologna, San Martin Theater, 17 March 2009.

H=277 lb (HAMLET=277 POUNDS) it is the first visual and performative sequence of a four-year artistic project (2009–2012), in which dramaturgy presents itself as a corpus of analytical and material-aesthetic evaluations starting from William Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Force transducers measure static and dynamic loads, in traction and compression – virtually without deflection.
Hamlet gets intoxicated by the virtual ghost that reflects himself, paternal and semblance, in the neuromuscular swirl. The brain is loaded with loving and filial correspondences, producing forced energy. The condition of equality, but opposite in perception, unleashes a movement of penetration into the real world. The neurotransmitter turns on the engines of chemistry. The man moves. At work, body! The brain is on! The transducer/player carries the energetic load of the punishment, of the paternal return without contact, of the flashback of a sentimental circuit that has just reopened.
“Mark me. My time is already here, I must surrender myself to the flame that torments me. Something is stinking in Denmark.” The burning smell reaches straight to the sensors that stimulate the wailing siren, the strength flows between the holes/pores of the flesh and bitter tears. The prayer resonates and resumes the path of matter that leads from one point to another point. The little relay unleashes the power and load of life, stubborn and tense. It slams into the massive, deadly body of the never-bending meter, albeit swallowing destiny. Vincenzo Salemi discharges the lightning and measures its weight, the compression created in the ether feels its strength and closes the circuit between the earth and the sky.

HAMLET 1|2|3 (Hamlets project) from Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Assessment: Maria Federica Masters, Francesco Pititto. View: Francesco Pititto. Transducers: Valentina Barbarini, Guglielmo Gazzelli, Paolo Maccini, Vincent Salemi, Elena Sorbi, Elena Varoli, Barbara Voghera. Sound acquisition system: Andrew Azzali.
Parma, Lenz Theatre, Phoenix 09, 20 maggio 2009.

H 1|2|3 is the study of the first three visual and performative sequences of a four-year artistic project (2009–2012), in which dramaturgy presents itself as a corpus of analytical and material-aesthetic evaluations starting from William Shakespeare's Hamlet.
In H 1|2|3 the story of Prince Hamlet is reread and 'evaluated' through a visual investigation, material and physical reflection on the bodies of the performers which penetrates Shakespearean language to define a new concrete dramaturgical horizon, constituted starting from the psychic and material existences of the actors: language circumscribes new words that bring to life the suffering and tragedy of Hamlet and of existence itself, as well as the death that seems to circumscribe every human action. The King's Ghost, Hamlet's father, forced to move slowly and curse his own tragic fate with cruel words, it is inscribed inside the tired body but full of visionary strength of the interpreter who seems to slowly slide outside the Shakespearean character, founding an autonomous poetic space engraved in its materiality which in the horror of death sculpts a new scenic portrait.
In the encounter with the ghost of his father Prince Hamlet, adorned with a metal hat and a studded collar as if set in the interpreter's body, filled with obsessive words the mother's incestuous drama and the uncle's murderous gesture, seeking the security of revenge in the violent vision of those images. Ophelia, wounded by madness in her beauty, forced into the fixation of an orthopedic collar, it gives Hamlet back all the words and things that had linked them in love, material signs of a farewell song that is concentrated in a final gesture wounded by tragedy and suffering. Moving on the stage like mechanical elements, Hamlet and Ophelia retain in their memory all the pain of separation from themselves and their love.

HAMLET 4|5|6 BLACK WIDOWS (Hamlets project) from Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Assessment: Maria Federica Masters, Francesco Pititto. View: Francesco Pititto. Transducers: Liliana Berte, Guglielmo Gazzelli, Paolo Maccini, Delfina Riviera, Barbara Voghera. Sound acquisition system: Andrew Azzali.
Collecchio, Court Theater, Nature Gods Theater Festival, 22 October 2009.

H 4|5|6 Black Widows, it is the third preparatory study of a four-year artistic project (2009–2012), in which dramaturgy presents itself as a corpus of analytical and material-aesthetic evaluations starting from William Shakespeare's Hamlet. It is a triptych dedicated to the "Black Queens" of Hamlet, Gertrude e Ofelia, protagonists of a similar destiny of death. In the slow and suggestive intercession of Shakespearean words, which are embedded in the living language of the material existences of the actors, in complete expressive autonomy, we glimpse the tragic nature of history and existence. The Regina Gertrude, looking for her first husband Hamlet, now only the memory of a ghost who cannot react to his gestures and his questions, she lets herself be seduced by Claudio's extreme proposal, Hamlet's brother, arousing the contempt and horror of Prince Hamlet, his son, determined to decisive violence against his uncle to avenge the murderous act against his father and honor his memory. At 'May' Queen Ofelia, in the heartbreaking plea to Hamlet not to abandon her, prepara, with black sequences, screaming and dramatic the final farewell in the suicidal waters that welcome his drowned body. Only in Gertrude's atonement, who drinks the poisoned chalice prepared by Hamlet, the drama of guilt and betrayal emerges.

HAMLET AT THE ROCK OF SAN SECONDO (Hamlets project) from Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Creation: Maria Federica Masters, Francesco Pititto. Translation and imaging: Francesco Pititto. Scene and costumes: Maria Federica Masters. Interpreters: Liliana Berte (in video), Franck Berzieri, Guglielmo Gazzelli, Paolo Maccini, Luigi Moia, Lino Pontremoli, Delfina Riviera, Vincent Salemi, Elena Varoli, Barbara Voghera. Musica: Andrew Azzali. Light design: Davide Cavandoli.
San Secondo, Rock of the Reds, Nature Gods Theater Festival, 3 November 2010.

If Hamlet and the beautiful Ophelia split
By Gianni Manzella, The poster, 14 November 2010

The paradox about the actor who starts from Hamlet. We had stopped before this threshold, some time ago, writing about the Death of Danton by Lenz Refractions at the palace of Colorno, ducal residence transformed into a mental hospital and then became one of the symbols of the institution denied in the battles led by Franco Basaglia.
What are those characters for us who are agitated by passions that are foreign to us. And it makes you think again, today that the now ten-year artistic journey that led Lenz to meet a group of elderly former mental patients from Colorno comes to the test of <<folly>> in Hamlet. Almost inevitably, by necessity rather than by destiny.
Franco Pititto has developed a poetic rewriting of Shakespeare's drama - we can read the words in the publication that accompanies the staging, very refined as is customary for the Parma ensemble. With Federica Maestri, they cut it into a series of scenes that drag spectators through the once sumptuous rooms of the Rossi fortress, run-down sixteenth-century manor drowned in the autumn mists of the lower Po Valley. Like a parallel action, images pass onto the walls or monitors which expand the action, recovering the memory of the rehearsals of the work, as if to say other moments of life. To further distance an identification already made problematic by the denial of roles. There will be three interpreters of Hamlet, often on stage at the same time, and two different Ophelias, while Gertrude, he will have a heavy male body under the black veil. In reality we shouldn't talk about interpreters, we are talking about actors (force transducers, they call them the craftsmen, with some reason of their own). Summoned to lead the spectators behind them.
But now those beautiful words are no longer there. They disappear from the actors' memories, impossible to recite. Because here it's a question of life and not of acting. To be and not to pretend, or to also be in the fiction of customs that denote a sensitivity, rather than an era. What we find instead is an Ophelia who evokes with a sort of ironic but also painful lightness a beauty perhaps possessed in her youth, trying to awaken the attention of a Laertes lost in a world of silent amazement – ​​patience, she repeats with sly coquetry, patience. Or another who, lying in an odalisque pose, mixes fairy tales and ends up in the events of Snow White. A King Claudius who prays with the prayers learned in childhood. This is where the miracle or alchemical transformation takes place, you choose. It's as if on the schedule of that first text, if another one lay down, truly an Ur-Hamlet (that was the title of the dazzling creation that took its inspiration from Franco Scaldati's writing in the Sicilian language, about ten years ago, one of the great wasted inventions of our theatre). A text made of silences, of sudden and improvised gestures, of words that are born only when they are said. Which does not erase the other but questions us about what it means for us.
And here also comes into play the mastery of the two creators who do nothing to impose a coercive adherence to their own scenic writing but curve it to meet those bodies: here is also the absolute distance from many willing experiences of theatrical work with people <<disabled>>, unable to escape the norm of acting.

Hamlet in Lenz: bodies from the underworld of madness
By Massimo Marino, boblog.corrieredibologna.corriere.it, 10 November 2010

“Me here, or I am not here" is the strange translation that throws Hamlet's "to be or not to be" from the heavens of metaphysics to the hell of the reality of bodies. They contrast the solemn and intimate environments of the Rocca dei Rossi in San Secondo with the humble, discharged, ferocious reality of the Lenz Rifraczioni actors who try to embody the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark without managing to hide their urgency as people imprisoned for years in a mental hospital and then, with the Basaglia law, liberate, entrusted to reception facilities, that is, branded with the label of down and instead there committed to demonstrating moving, extremely high precision in battle with the solemn and plastered words of the most famous theatrical text of all time. Ringing and tangled voices under skies of mythological frescoes, fantastic, fable-like, with knights, demons and dragons, heraldic insignia and cherubs, animals, dee, heroes and heroines (…).
The show, Hamlet, begins at the foot of the steps of the Rocca e, as in other Lenz creations, winds through the breathtaking environments of this countryside monument that it hosted, according to Vasari, a Parmigianino fleeing from Parma dedicated to mysterious alchemy experiments. The actors leave wearing Shakespeare's words, in translation that undermines stereotypes and verbal facilitations to highlight the dark points or illuminate the stridencies of the text. Then, little by little, they lose them and find them again, bringing out their way of being, their "here" contrasted by that continuous "not here" that was the disease, the madness, imprisonment, separation from the world, the tiring return, old age, in tension with a text steeped in political madness. Hamlet doubles or triples himself on various bodies, in Barbara's minute and ringing one, in banal words, everyday but full of the charm of Paolo Maccini's lowland bar storytelling, in the overflowing and peaceful one of Enzo Salemi. Behind the dark wood of the Council Chamber, under a Bellerophon on Pegasus fighting a fire-spewing Chimera, the spectrum, in the flesh and on video, becomes the frowning expression, toothless, terrible by Guglielmo Gazzelli, like a nightmare emerging from the underworld of madness, reproduced on the wall like a corpse in a black and white mortuary film. Polonius will be another very old man, almost motionless, incapable of producing the goods of the text, parole, parole, parole, comically hidden behind a door torn from the wall to spy on Hamlet, in the guise of Luigi Moia. Everyone is covered in pale lunar mood, the actors and characters are dressed in black with basketball shoes, among paintings and frescoes that evoke other metamorphoses, mythological and fable-like, Apuleius and Aesop.
We will see the spectrum again later, with beautiful directorial invention, as King Claudius, the usurper, his brother's killer, the uncle, the other father masters the fragile protagonist. Terrible impatience erupts in this actor-character driven at a pressing and always angry pace, while a resigned sweetness and abandonment shines through in the close-ups of Liliana Bertè's queen on video, in various rooms, embodied in a bulky Franck Berzieri en travesti with veil. Laertes appears (Mauro Zumino) or disappears from some scene (The actors, they told us, in some cases they didn't make it to the end of a long work process, demanding). 
Ophelia makes my heart skip a beat, with his piano spiel, with his lament “I am young / they are beautiful / son carina / I'm nice..." as she walks away in a long portico towards suicide with an Elizabethan-like ruff loaded by Pierrot (Delfina Riviera, name from times gone by, from a gravestone in a cemetery in Bassa, like Ophelia), or with her softness lying on an uncomfortable old sofa between empty chairs and two screens showing her beautiful and marked face, while with the overflowing body he repeats, biascicandola, the jealous beauty tale of Snow White (Elena Varoli) and the Hamlets are ready to turn into three gravediggers in one long, bare library, with hats and simple black dresses that project them under Beckettian skies.
These actor-characters, these men and women who break the theatrical envelopes that should contain them, opening up joyful and devastated panoramas, I'm clowns, wrecks, ghosts, inserts, in a world where Evil has become common consciousness of "filth, vandalism", between the voices, too many voices pressing in your head. They speak sliding from the sublime to the urgency of everyday life on the edge of an apocalyptic swamp, looking, with a flash of sovereign dignity, to defend themselves "from your cowardly blows", Fortuna. Or at least to “die, sleep…". How Hamlet's monologue still resonates, moved to the final seal of this phenomenal, exciting adventure, in a long solemn room with all these hard-working actors lined up for the applause of the few spectators allowed to visit their painful rooms.

Being Hamlet. Aesthetics of tragedy and ethical contemplation
By Matteo Antonaci, lenzrifrazioni.it/visioni, 2010

Hamlet is the rereading of the Shakespearean tragedy that Lenz Rifrazioni carries out by focusing attention on the psychic sensitivity of the contemporary actor. Presented during the Natura Dèi Teatri festival within the spaces of the Rocca dei Rossi in San Secondo, the show is the culmination of a journey that the theater group undertook in 2000, collaborating with the Mental Health Department of the AUSL of Parma. 
Se Cute is the thematic node around which the fifteenth edition of the Parma festival revolves, precisely the physicality of actors who were former long-term psychiatric patients of the Colorno mental hospital becomes the door and access key towards the stratification of the tragic feeling preserved in Hamlet.
In a fragmented scene inside the different rooms that make up the Fortress, erected in 1466 by Pier Maria Rossi, the performers of Lenz's Hamlet move. Their bodies appear like ghostly presences, opaque, oscillating between visibility (limite/cute) of taboos on madness and invisibility (concealment of the skin) of the institution that welcomes it. Among the magnificent frescoes of the Bolognese mannerist school, the actors act as continuously evolving forms that shape themselves from time to time, taking on the appearance of the characters in the tragedy. 
Welcomed in the atrium of the Palace, the audience follows these characters in their slow journey constructed through the dramaturgical translation of the Shakespearean text. While on the one hand the latter remains anchored to the narrative word of the original text, on the other hand it borders on the absorption of the psychic/emotional feelings of the protagonists, metamorphosing into self-representation, rewriting of the self through identification with the tragic character, therefore through the body and the techné of theatrical material. Lenz Refractions tackles three different monumental entities in Hamlet: the Rocca dei Rossi, acts as a fairytale castle and narrating space symmetries and asymmetries of the dramaturgical text, Hamlet, one of the masterpieces of Western dramaturgy, clay continuously shaped and malleable by theatrical experimentation, e, In the end, man caught in his most disturbing nature, that is, in the diversity imposed by the dominant culture.
If the multiplication of the tragic plan occurs through the breaking down of the barriers that separate the representation of madness (in Shakespeare Hamlet pretends to be mad) from madness as a real existential condition, the Hamlet-like world created by Lenz Rifraczioni seems to mark the division between a normality imposed by medicine and psychology (corresponding to the viewer's gaze) and the diversity that continually justifies and testifies to the status of those who watch. While the acting figures, in their immediate recognizability, they become perfect rewritings of Shakespearean characters, the technical apparatus used in the show appears as a redundant sign. Surrounded by videos that testify to the preparatory work for the show, The actors, overexposed in their diversity, they emerge like masks of a mask to be shown, where the Latin term contains the same root as the term Monère, that is, to warn. And it is precisely the warning of a threshold, in conclusion, the highest condition of the tragic in Lenz's Hamlet. As happens in the mollusc Hamlet by Socìetas Raffello Sanzio, every single character is trapped in their own existential condition, locked up in a cage emptied of the dichotomous relationship between being and non-being; in Hamlet's doubt indelibly marked on the flesh (from the years of hospitalization in the Colorno mental hospital), in the impossibility of subverting and raising awareness of common opinion. So in the knowledge that Hamlet's tragedy will happen anyway – continuously, perpetually – with or without the spectator. Each actor camouflages his own status in that of the characters in the tragedy, entering perfectly into symbiosis with them, transcribing their narrative score through a singular emotional feeling, which is, at the same time, path along the diegetic lines of the dramaturgical text and scrolling along the chronological axis of one's existence, on the invisible lines of possibilities (and probability) of cognitive perception.
 While every word takes on carnal weight, while the characters of Hamlet fall onto the stage with the gravity of playful madness, like ghosts and invisible corpses, while love and abandonment devour the insides to shine through like worms on the skin, on the edges of the scene the actors experience their disorientation, staying without acting, they are looking for guidance, they cast glances, they help each other, they hold hands, they make the spectator's gaze inadequate. With what sensitivity to approach the scene? With what existential diaphragm to penetrate Hamlet's castle? And what happens when the vision (or visionary) leaves room for objectification (or to a condition – that of madness – definitively objectified)?
Even the gaze of the public, In the end, he is caught in the impossibility of action, suspended in the doubt of the balance between an ethical or aesthetic contemplation of the tragedy.

HAMLET by LENZ REFRACTIONS

A see-saw between character and interpreter, really to be or not to be
By Eleonora Felisatti, lenzrifrazioni.it/visioni, 2010

The air in the Po Valley is colder than usual, in San Secondo Parmense there is a light mist, which makes this night in early November eerie, almost mysterious. Around the Court of the Rossi, silence and desert. As, it's easier to imagine being at the gates of Elsinore Castle. White makeup masks. Voice amplified on the microphone, which reverberates in the spaces of the Renaissance palace words that are not immediately understandable because they are not perfectly articulated. On this multi-layered image, the first two actors of Lenz Rifrazioni begin to guide the audience through the splendidly frescoed rooms of the Rocca. Once you go up the staircase, you find yourself in a real audience room. E, if the number of performers is fewer than those foreseen for the second scene in Shakespeare's Hamlet, the videos projected on the background however recall other presences: not just the ghosts repeatedly evoked in the story, but also other moments of the performers. The images in two dimensions mix, they overlap, they complete and open new horizons compared to those in three dimensions. Seeing videos that look like footage of tests and/or laboratories, one is implicitly forced to consider both the life of the group outside the performance and the life of the characters outside the scene. Already, because it is precisely through a funnel skimming, which starts from the original text, goes through familiar sayings and stock phrases, but also through the vision that the project members have, which leads to the condensation adopted for the staging. The video-live action combination, dear to Lenz for years, it repeats room after room. Really, you go through some where there are only screens that take you forward, diluting infinitely, the exit of a character. In another case, the video is projected on the floor and trampled by Hamlet fighting with ghosts. Until the penultimate scene, in which there is only the video to lead towards the conclusions of the story and its 'moral', subsequently explained in the presence of all the actors, and consequently of all the characters, in the main hall.
The choice to have a single actor play multiple roles, it is not merely instrumental to the numerical size of the cast, but rather it has the effect of not making us 'attached' to the character nor to the "transducer" (term to indicate the actor, adopted by the Lenz management for H=277 lb, first study of Shakespeare's tragedy), in the sense that any expectation on the outcome of the interpretation is forcibly disregarded or even cancelled.
What can work is to focus on Hamlet's words, rather than Polonius, or Ophelia. On their gestures. In this way the obstacle in identification given by an imperfect acting performance is expertly avoided by dropping the emphasis on the reality of the interpreter. Pathos undergoes a vector shift: what creates it, in the Lenz Hamlet, it is not so much the content of the text but rather the strength of the action of the interpreters. 
The here-and-now of the former long-term psychiatric patients of the Colorno mental hospital, rather than the role of the characters. And it matters little whether the story tells of betrayals at court or of Snow White's unexpected life among the dwarfs, what we could not shake off is the perception of the aftermath of madness.
The spectator has the choice to decide which altered perception of reality is most irreversible, whether that of the actors or that of the characters. And what remains of the original text? The emphasis is on repetition, almost mechanical, almost an echo that moves away from the suggestion of assertiveness to rather insinuate doubts, of woodworms for the spectator. Those who, trivially, they will remain even afterwards, on the route that leads away from the damp fortification of medieval origin.

HAMLET AT THE COLORNO PALACE (Hamlets project) from Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Creation: Maria Federica Masters, Francesco Pititto. Translation and imaging: Francesco Pititto. Scene and costumes: Maria Federica Masters. Interpreters: Liliana Berte, Franck Berzieri, Guglielmo Gazzelli, Paolo Maccini, Luigi Moia, Lino Pontremoli, Delfina Riviera, Vincent Salemi, Elena Varoli, Barbara Voghera. Musica: Andrea Azzali_Monophon. Light design: Gianluca Bergamini.
They color, Ducal Palace, 11 October 2011.

They color – Part 1:

They color – Part 2:

Hamlet, growth in intensity
By Valeria Ottolenghi, Journal of Parma, 17 October 2011

A new installation with different echoes on the interpretative level of the <<Hamlet>> by Lenz Refractions, directed by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, music by Andrea Azzali, a dense, exciting theatrical outcome, the result of an intense laboratory commitment born and grown in collaboration with the Mental Health Department of the Parma Local Health Authority. We remember this labyrinthine creation, last year, to the Rocca di San Secondo, now with new emotional values ​​for the place too, They color, the memory of the mental hospital presence. Because on stage, in this traveling show, diverse <<stations>> on the main floor of the Palace, there is a large group of former patients, <<sensitive actors>> as they have been named by the Parma company for some time, Liliana Berte, Franck Berzieri, John Carnival, Guglielmo Gazzelli, Paolo Maccini, Luigi Moia, Lino Pontremoli, Delfina Riviera, Vincent Salemi, Mauro Zunino, supported by Elena Varoli and Barbara Voghera, which he proposes again, at the end, in the last room, the most famous of Shakespeare's monologues in the form first encountered years ago, in the Lenz Teatro space, <<me here, I'm not here...>>, with a multiplication of voices, <<to die…to dream>>, repeated words. And Hamlet's madness creates, inevitably, other disturbances, reflexes, suggestions. The images projected on the screens are magnificent, you die, more televisions. The start on the staircase. Multiply the figures of the protagonists. The same actor as the ghost and in the role of the murderer, re Claudio: now he is the king. At times we smile at the jokes which take on a surprising character, unexpected: Gertrude would like for example, with absolute simplicity, love the new husband and continue to love that strange son of an aggressiveness incomprehensible to her, and Ophelia remembers her father's advice on possible consolation with another young man, repeating << patience!>> – but then going towards the river, gradually crossing more and more salt... Many passages of great emotion, questions about God, the awareness of the death of another Gertrude, that knows about joy and suffering, the prayers repeated before the cross like King Claudius, revenge is therefore impossible...

Theater and psychiatry: Lenz Refractions
From the Appunti Residui blog, by Federico Mascagni, journalist of L’Unità
http://federicomascagni.com/2011/11/14/teatro-psichiatria/#more-278, 14 November 2011

In the 1997 the Parma theater company Lenz Rifrazioni takes courage and decides to deal with psychiatric illness and how dark lies behind these mental aspects, of language, of personality. A complex job begins that can never be considered definitive. It was perhaps destiny for a company that is inspired among others by the schizophrenic poet Holderlin to have to investigate how art pierces the minds of madmen and how it is returned to the public.
Maria Federica Masters, co-founder of Lenz Rifraczioni, he immediately has a happy intuition in defining their complex activity: a psychic tale crafted with open brains. certain self-representations of patients with their skulls open come to mind, free to the air, or the medieval woodcuts of doctors drilling into the heads of patients in the hope of releasing who knows what vapor or liquid of madness.
A different creative production, which surprises Lenz Rifraczioni right from the first tests. The show is a vehicle of emotions, and it makes us reflect with amazement and wonder at what we do not understand, or fall into the abyss of what we fear. Far from the morbidity of the Banum circus, but close to it in the representation of a different reality.
Maria Federica Maestri tells us how we can find ourselves at every meeting on the abyss of the delirious word in a mixture of fake naivety, of submissive attitudes or sudden reactions, of pharmacological fixity. Each text is necessarily a creative and biographical reworking, an opportunity to affirm one's denied and distorted identity. Dramaturgical times implode in their minds, and the script enters a psychic and timeless dimension with few specific references.
Hamlet: in the Royal Palace of Colono restored in its mannerist splendor, the oldest of the actors lived out their last moments in the mental hospital by living in a wing of this magnificent building. Now they move around reciting the world's most famous tragedy with quiet grunts, with falsetto screams, in staid tones, in a monotone voice. It is a venacular Hamlet, crime stories in the Parma countryside, a script that they have acted out in their own way in life.
An operation mediated and protected by psychiatrists, as it should be, which produces moments of awareness, when to the flowery language of Elizabethan theatre (almost absent for obvious reasons) replace phrases like “I did some bad things”: a sudden confession in the context of a performance, a situation that gives voice to the treasure of contradictory feelings and experiences that the actor has within himself.
Nothing is imposed. Everything is coordinated and directed. When obviously it doesn't derail, but it is a risk that must be taken into account. Maria Federica Maestri once again has a happy definition for this experiment that has lasted more than ten years: it is a path for actors where they can recognize the fragments of their being and use them as material for reconstructing their personality. They are indeed happy, the crazy ones, to carry out this activity with unquestionable talent that keeps them suspended in an indefinite area despite the enormous suffering that never abandons them.
The search for harmony, of trust, of patience in waiting for their times, they were the tools that had to be used to build everything. Rewrite scripts about them. In addition to Hamlet, the choice previously fell happily on "Life is a dream" by Caldòn de la Barca, a story of imprisonment, of confusion between reality and perception, justice/injustice, pain and redemption which I believe is even more in the hearts of actors.
The conclusion in the words of Maria Federica Maestri: “Able-bodied actors give themselves rules for being on stage, a creative language and grammar. With 'open brains' the uncontrolled brain stimulus produces results of expressive freedom totally outside of convention, placing no limits on creative grammar.”

HAMLET AT THE FARNESE THEATER IN PARMA (Hamlets project) from Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Creation: Maria Federica Masters, Francesco Pititto. Translation and imaging: Francesco Pititto. Scene and costumes: Maria Federica Masters. Interpreters: Liliana Berte, Franck Berzieri, Guglielmo Gazzelli (in video), Paolo Maccini, Luigi Moia (in video), Delfina Riviera, Vincent Salemi, Elena Varoli (in video), Barbara Voghera. Musica: Andrew Azzali. Light design: Gianluca Bergamini.
Parma, Farnese Theater, Pilotta Palace, 23 maggio 2012.

Farnese Theater – Part 1:

Farnese Theater – Part 2:

Hamlet played by "madmen" that frees the mind
By Giuseppe Di Stefano, Ilsole24 ore.com, 31 maggio 2012

Can this absolute masterpiece be investigated countless times, updated, deconstructed, contaminated, offer itself as yet new and unexplored in its exploration and give us further meanings? Never has a representation of Hamlet been so destabilizing to our senses as this one by Lenz Refractions.

With this work, retranslated into the conceptual and thematic nodes to derive a new expressiveness, the long theatrical research conducted by the Parma company reaches a surprising outcome of dramaturgical rewriting on borderline bodies in which, the border between love, madness and death, finds further meaning. Human and artistic. To embody Shakespearean words, inhabiting them with emotional adherence, personal and unique, which is innervated in the mental and physical fabric of the actors themselves “sensitive” directed by Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, they are a group of former mental patients from the Colorno mental hospital and now guests of the therapeutic-rehabilitative community of Pellegrino Parmense.
With them, and other, the company has been experimenting with its expressive abilities for over ten years in a permanent laboratory that has become an exemplary experience in Europe. And it has the value of a vital experience, unforgettable, participate in’ Hamlet on stage in the exclusive setting of the Farnese Theatre.
Inside the majestic wooden baroque arena begins the spatial and mental journey which will unfold in the rooms of the Art Gallery and in the backstage - with a prologue on the external staircase and the gallery -, to finally return to the vast empty audience. Here a long walkway joins it to the stage. Queen Gertrude sits in the center while the usurper Claudius stands behind a screen. We both spy them replicated in an autonomous and colloquial film in which the prince of the extraordinary down, Barbara Voghera, he rails against them. From here we will follow the triple Hamlet, split and one, simile, in Paolo Maccini, a Buster Keaton; we will follow these ghostly presences, clown, wrecks, who will lead us into the dense web of a labyrinth of the mind where they will dialogue between sculptural busts, statue, paintings and frescoes (…) We are left with the unspeakable emotion of a stormy journey between waves of ethical and aesthetic billows, ferried by these sailing companions, bodies of painful poetry and imperfect beauty that the art of theater has freed from the shell of the mind.
L'Hamlet in Lenz: irrational and metaphysical
Actors who were former psychiatric patients inside the Farnese Theater in Parma
By Tommaso Chimenti, National Courier, 2 June 2012

Let's start from the equation Hamlet equals Christ. Let's start like this as a bomb on the market. Like gas in a souk. Hamlet, orphan son alone having to face power, abuse, the affections that have turned their backs on him, the madness, not being believed, having to act as spokesperson and banner and revenge by his father. Jesus sent to earth to make himself believed to be the son of God, operation impossible, to carry the word of the father, to avenge with actions the unheeded precepts of the parent, to give the new way, to plow, even with blood, the new earth. Hamlet is also Jesus in a dazzling image that Lenz prepares in the underground rooms of the Palazzo della Pilotta, where two double Hamlets stand like thieves on the sides of an empty and deserted cross (…)
Third time in three years that the Parma Lenz Refractions, to the century the director, set designer and costume designer Maria Federica Maestri and the playwright and photographer Francesco Pititto, they stage Shakespeare's masterpiece with actors who were former psychiatric patients of the Colorno Psychiatric Hospital, alongside their historic actress, Barbara Voghera, girl suffering from Down syndrome, full of acting strength, of exceptional and impetuous emotional control and vocal expressiveness (…) The journey (moving sixty spectators per show is difficult to manage, I applaud the professionalism of all the staff), because it is literally itinerant, and it is a via crucis in the meanders of the Palazzo della Pilotta, passing through the National Gallery and flowing into the Farnese Theatre, like being inside the bowels of the protagonist, in his clouded thoughts, in the echoes that are lost, in incomprehensible passages, in his blocked veins, in his most lacerating and doubtful nightmares, in his deviated intestines, falling, searching in the dark without light, in the mists that don't allow us to see clearly, to understand, to find their place in the world.
It's a Hamlet in a nutshell where more than the sentences count, the word, where they remain imprinted more than the hands, the piercing eyes, they break through, they pierce the theater and become land, concrete, there and now, asking for an account, responsibility, requests. They have glassy eyes and slow movements but are explosive and electric, ironic and concentrated, dense and intense: Delfina is Ophelia, Giovanni, the theorist and intellectual of the group, It's Laertes, Enzo, Paolo, Barbara are so many Hamlets in a continuous exchange of persona, between fantasy and dream, Frank is Queen Gertrude (…) Catacombs and dungeons, alleys and holes in the minutiae of ancient words, renewed here, in the pompous grandeur of an artistic past, here in the dark, like a world in decline, outside and inside us (…).
Watching/listening that enchants
<<Hamlet>> di Lenz: actors <<sensitive>> at the Farnese Theatre
By Valeria Ottolenghi, Journal of Parma, 25 maggio 2012

Immediately of considerable charm, an enchanting vision/listening, the first part of the show, which takes place on the monumental staircase leading to the entrance of the Farnese Theatre, where some intense ones are projected, clear, vast images, while the first dialogue takes place remotely, the following audience, a traveling creation, for subsequent stops: has arrived in the Pilotta spaces, after the Rocca di San Secondo and the Royal Palace of Colorno, Lenz's Hamlet Refractions, with a text that reworks the Shakespearean work by absorbing, mixing life experiences of <<sensitive actors>>, in new trails of meaning and emotion. And the dimension of power is multiplied with the royal couple placed on the stage of the Farnese Theatre, while Hamlet will get closer to his mother along that walkway that will later cross Ophelia to die in the water... very effective, a special density of interpretative values ​​and disturbances, the scenes in this magnificent space, just as the subsequent passage in the dim light under the steps seems to take on echoes of psychoanalytic excavation: instead they seemed more scattered, especially compared to the unforgettable display in Colorno, the central scenes, inside some rooms of the Pinoteca. Screens, projections, roles multiplied for this Hamlet, translation, playwriting, imagoturgy by Francesco Pititto, regia, scene, costumes by Maria Federica Maestri, interpreters Liliana Bertè, Franck Berzieri, John Carnival, Guglielmo Gazzelli, Paolo Maccini, Luigi Moia, Delfina Riviera, Vincent Salemi, Elena Varoli, Barbara Voghera, music by Andrea Azzali/Monophon. Everydayness of words and disconcerting abysses of disorientation coexist wonderfully, also leaving space, in some passages, to smile (…).
Hamlet by Lenz Refractions: judgment and its crisis
By Andrea Pocosgnich, Theater criticism, 11 June 2012

The first steps into Palazzo della Pilotta are immediately burdened by the grandeur that surrounds us, on the stairs leading to the theater two actors welcome us, on the left we understand that there is Hamlet (Paolo Maccini), neutral, does not show emotion, it will be his natural mask throughout the show, on the right Barbara Voghera, she's Hamlet too, but his interpretation is diametrically opposed to the first: he literally climbs on the spelling of Francesco Pititto's rewriting, she fights with all her strength against the pronunciation impediments that Down syndrome would impose on her; he will search his little body for a resonance modulated by continuous contractions. The first videos projected on the balcony (in which the ghost of the father also appears), but they will be numerous and will welcome the spectator into every space, characterizing the entire scenic writing of Maria Federica Maestri. This Hamlet has always been nomadic, in the internal path of the show and in the constant search for unusual spaces where to install one's emotions and contradictions. After the Rocca dei Rossi and the Royal Palace of Colorno, the collaboration between the institutions and the company has given us this small and fragile utopia of the Farnese, unfortunately dissolved an evening early due to the Emilian earthquake.
It's from 1999 that Lenz collaborates with the Mental Health Department, bringing theater and art into the lives of those who have lived in the mental hospital. There it is in their faces, “force transducers” (that's what the authors call them), in their absent and perpetually sedated eyes - except for the irrepressible woman of the group -, you experience that disorientation mentioned above, a continuous uneasiness of those who watch with pity the videos in which the actors/patients prepare themselves by giving themselves a smile or doing their make-up, a tightening in the stomach that in one fell swoop causes that "kritikos" from which the experience in judgment derives to falter, to suddenly bring the crisis back to the surface. The one created through the rooms of the National Gallery is a dazzling journey, among marble busts, cherubs who in the semi-darkness become distressing hanging and amputated figures, the backstage and then the majesty of the theatre. To the queen, played by Franck Berzieri, she is still and tiny 40 meters of stage, around the void filled only by voices, which outside of any artistic canon become painful chants. On the backdrop, in a gigantic video - like all in a Dreyera black and white - Voghera's expressiveness is lent to a furious projection of the queen. Claudio only appears on video, painful presence of Guglielmo Gazzelli who passed away a few days before the debut, his denied prayer is among the most intense scenes.
The spectator's attention is continually destabilized by phenomena external to the essential hic et nunc of the theatrical act, whether they are the paintings in the art gallery, the videos or that sweet scent of wood that anticipates the grandeur of the room, in this context it would be a difficult task, even for able-bodied artists, catalyze the perception of the individual spectator. Intensity is a continuously broken string, however, capable of becoming tense and vibrating loudly in some moments such as the famous monologue remodeled as the final act and entrusted to Barbara Voghera, recited with tenacity in a passionate melee with Shakespearean verse from the first row of the audience; or Ophelia's suicide. The young character is played by the no longer very young Delfina Rivieri, her lament becomes deafening due to the inability to distinguish between Ophelia's sufferings and those experienced by the interpreter «[..] my legs, my veins, my arms, I have to die for love, my heart, my soul, my breast, my body, my head my hair […] how much water, how many fish that jump out, I don't know how to swim, how do I do it, m’affogherò, I have to die" is a sharp litany repeated in tears, in a corridor of light that illuminates the catwalk on which the frail Ophelia walks slowly before leaving the theater, in a very long and suspended time.

Lenz's Hamlet Refractions
At the end of May, an event of very particular delicacy in an enchanting setting in the city of Parma
By Renzo Francabandera, Paneacqua, 12 June 2012

The revival of Lenz Rifrazioni's Hamlet is an event in its own way. After the installations at the Rocca dei Rossi in San Secondo (2010) and at the Royal Palace of Colorno (2011), Lenz has revived his rereading of Shakespeare's classic directed by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, in the last week of May within the stupendous setting of the Farnese Theater in Parma. On an annual basis, so, this experiential itinerary takes spectators on a journey-comparison with the other and with the fragile self that we accept with greater difficulty. The heart of this work, even the dramaturgical drafting and the deeper intimacy that the staging emanates, it is due to participation, as actors, of some of the guests of the Therapeutic Rehabilitation Community, for an experience that began over ten years ago in collaboration with the Mental Health Department of the Parma Local Health Authority.
The “sensitive” actors are Liliana Bertè, Franck Berzieri, John Carnival, Guglielmo Gazzelli, Paolo Maccini, Luigi Moia, Delfina Riviera, Vincent Salemi, Elena Varoli, Barbara Voghera.
From the entrance staircase the viewer is led between video installations and moments recited through a sort of Hamlet-like via crucis, where even the crucifixion finds explicit mention. The Farnese Theatre, its ravines, the beautiful rooms of the building that hosts it, they are a place within which the recitation manages to suspend itself in epiphanies of the unresolved, where what one witnesses never closes or completes any concept, leaving a feeling of dreamlike suspension, so much so that to be or not to be comes to the end, almost as if to confirm the intermediate stage, the half-sleep of the soul from which everything is inspired, that capable hypnotic moment, sometimes, to give insights, premonitions, to become a repository of even more absolute wisdom, precisely because it is not decoded with the value system of the social assembly, but on the edge of the human sensitive, in that limit that sometimes approaches each of us in a dangerously clear and legible form.
The dialectical confrontation between Hamlet and Ophelia, before the latter's suicide, it is perfect from this point of view: the two characters are no longer Shakespearean emanations but through the characters they bring their experiences to the stage, their solitudes, with him that, in condemning her to a life without love with "crazy" words, resolves the dialogue into one of the show's comedic highs, a comedy that arises precisely from the observation of the state of marginalization in which those who love too much, who feels too much, ends up finding each other, with a Beckettian and comic resignation (…)