CATHARINA OF SIENA re-edition 2022

A succession of twelve sanctifying practices. A penitent lamb, she becomes the breath, the saliva, the ointment of Jesus in the fullness of the scourge. Nourished only by the host and the blood, she asks in a high-pitched voice to belong to the unclean of excess and to return to the extra-world of her childish nature.

LENZ’S LENZ
Staging project of the works of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, through four re-edition creations: Catherine Of Siena, Lenz by Georg Büchner, Shakespears Geist, The Soldiers. Inspirational figure in 1985 of the birth of the artistic formation Lenz Rifrazioni (today Foundation) is a German playwright who lived at the end of the 18th century, a theologian and man of letters who died mad in Moscow at the age of only forty. Jakob Lenz expresses a strongly anti-rhetorical vision of the crisis of western man, anticipating with pre-Marxist sensitivity the great themes of the 20th century: anti-militarism, social injustice, violence against women, criticism of patriarchy and dominant male power.

Already staged by the ensemble in three different versions in 1987, 2000 and 2004, it is an unfinished drama that remains significant in the artistic journey of Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, because in the adolescent fury of the first apparitions, in the suffering of youthful visions, and in the mystical ecstasy of maturity, the poetic ages of Lenz Fondazione are reflected in an authentic portrait.

In the 2022 version, the protagonist remains Sandra Soncini – ‘extreme interpreter’ of the work -, accompanied by performers Carlotta Spaggiari and Tiziana Cappella, while the sound design by Andrea Azzali reworks the music of the previous version created together with Adriano Engelbrecht. In Lenzi’s mystical theatre, the reference to the Saint of Siena is purely imaginary: from the initial tragedy of a painter, CATHARINA VON SIENA becomes the struggle of a saint who fights temptations with penitence and the injustices of the world with prayer. The new version artistically translates the intensity of Saint Catherine’s spiritual praxis, transforming it into a mystical reverberation of the liberation and affirmation of the contemporary, undisciplined, irregular and marginal body.

In the dramaturgical invention, Catherine sinks into a distorted biographical landscape, where together with some figures taken from the hagiography of the saint, other unexpected ones appear, such as that of Correggio, who lived centuries later, in an exhilarating mixture of literary inaccuracies and historical misunderstandings typical of German Romanticism and Lenz’s imaginative writing.

In the installation made up of ten stacked basins in which the chromatic verb of Jesus’ face flows, the time of mystical action is sculpted: Catherine is the phenomenon of God, the traces of his presence are engraved in her. Holy action and divine contemplation are accomplished in twelve trials, each revealing the matter and space of epiphany. The work is a succession of arduous sanctifying practices that lead Catherine to beatitude. The heavenly bride, a penitent lamb, becomes breath, saliva, the ointment of Jesus in the full fulfilment of the scourge.

Catherine’s body, nourished only by the host and blood, asks with a sharp voice to belong to the unclean of excess and to return to the extra-world of her infant nature. Blessed because without food, blessed because quenched by her own spit, blessed because dirty and without dignity. Catherine drowns in the realm of youths with livid and swollen veins, of queens with protruding bones, of schoolgirls of eternal regurgitation. Little Catherine wants to die. She wants to die in the theatre. And the theatre must die in Catherine, becoming itself cold, mute and rigid. Her resurrection is in the truth of the body, without identity, without will, without need, free to be God’s red strawberry.