Adelchi

Massimo Marino

Adelchi, Ermengarda, the humble, the ghosts, the sensitive actors of Lenz Rifrazioni

It's called Adelchi but the protagonist is her, the humiliated, the offended, the sacrificed, Ermengarda. She moves in a world of shadows, a shadow herself, in an opalescent milky scene veiled by transparent sheets, in Lenz Rifrazioni's latest work in Parma. It takes place at the beautiful Natura Dèi Teatri festival, which attempted to give voice to the opera that Giuseppe Verdi thought so much and never wrote, King Lear, and presented that masterpiece that is Singspiele by Maguy Marin. Adelchi arrives on stage after The Betrothed (made last year), in a diptych of the “humble” entrusted to those “sensitive actors” with whom Lenz has long chosen to share his artistic journey, former chronic patients of the Colorno asylum, Down, autistic and other people thrown by suffering, by a presumed “normal” communication deficit, which sharpens other sensibilities, other echoes, other presences. As in The Betrothed, more than in that production that invited the audience to move between various veiled rooms, here we are faced with ghosts, in a scene with muted tones, like the sounds that surround us from the very beginning, a symphony of plane takeoffs, dog whining, city or stadium crowds. White veils mark four environments, this time facing the public. In front stands a chair with a tennis racket; behind an armchair with a man who will don the (metaphorical) robes of the powerful, Desiderius, the Lombard king father of Adelchi and Ermengarda, and Charlemagne, the husband who repudiates Ermengarda, the enemy who defeats Adelchi. At the bottom, a bed covered with plastic that, at perhaps the most emotional moment, will become a package wrapper to cover the suffering body of the protagonist, as in the works of the sculptor Christo, which envelops palaces and monuments. And then there is a lateral corridor that allows these ectoplasms to approach, to manifest themselves. Ermengarda is entrusted to the gentle, intense, receptive presence of Carlotta Spaggiari, “actress with autism spectrum syndrome”, the hall notes inform us. Perfect performer according to director Maria Federica Maestri of the two light/dark planes of this tragedy: “dual in her absolute desire for presence and need for withdrawal, in the emotional hypersensitivity deployed in expressive silence, in the extraordinary artistic density silenced by the communicative phobia”. It is a vessel that receives, that accumulates, that confiscates, that suffers this Ermengarde, who presents herself saying (in a microphoned voice, like everyone else), a shadow that emerges from the shadow: “I hear in my ears, I listen, I receive, I hear… a voice that I recognize… I know it… I don't speak but I say … the wind comes out of my mouth, sighs, airs…”. She is a figure who humiliates herself in front of the man in the armchair-father-husband (Franck Berzieri), on all fours like a dog, then offering herself almost naked to the groom, from whom she is chased away. And he seeks comfort in his brother (Carlo Destro), who is also destined to succumb. With him he plays a silent game of tennis without the ball made of evolutions, hugs, affection: and the non-existent ball at a certain point is lost, vanishes, I dream and regret happy times. As in Manzoni, evil is done or suffered: and these inglourious heroes suffer it, becoming figures of martyrdom, seeking refuge, perhaps now impossible, under the wings of the God who consoles, here silent. He inane. She breathes under the plastic at the bottom, shadow of anxiety. She wraps herself in monastic robes and, between the gasp and the cry of a long agony, she chants words of pain, her ears covered with headphones, words of tragedy like fury… bristling… face… pale… pain… pity… white bed… on the ground… parched… offended… in a long litany of disjointed syntax, of monumental wound, to create through sound and reiteration, a critique of meaning, of the world that inflicts pain. The characters, floating in the fog, after Adelchi's failures, after vain attempts at duetting, each wander into their own space, across three separate floors, in a long twilight of these vanquished of life: those who have the power (the fathers), those who don't (the children); those who die, and those who are content with the wrongs of suffering them, so as not to do them. Patient theatre, of suffering. The suggestions of this show are drawn from the literary work of Alessandro Manzoni and left to navigate freely, between films projected in round shots of a changing countryside, autumn, spring, trees, dry branches, then flowers, and dogs, in the continuum of the pulsation of an indifferent nature. This process sometimes leaves the viewer lost, also because this tragedy is not known, in its junctions, like The Betrothed, it is not such a shared “myth”. You have to indulge in images, in smudged words, let yourself float in a world echoed, deeply, within yourself. Yet there still remains a dissatisfaction, which perhaps pertains to gender. After Adelchi, Manzoni abandoned tragedy, perhaps because with his expressive rigidities, his precise range of tone and form, he did not allow him to demonstrate the infinite mobility of reality. Here too the feeling is that the pain in its theatrical reiteration becomes, in the end, unsustainable, already foreseen, redundant, in some way rhetorical. Lenz's intent is to dig right under this rhetoric as well (it seems to us). And yet here the happy, demiurgic arbitrariness of their best works sometimes gives saturation before productive, shocking vertigo. However, he is admired for the observation of the actors he stages, in a meritorious long-term laboratory work carried out in collaboration with the Parma Local Health Authority – Integrated Mental Health Care Department. In addition to directing, Maria Federica Maestri designed the costumes and installation; Francesco Pititto accompanied her in her conception, curating dramaturgy and “imagoturgy” the construction of the imaginary world. The music is by Andrea Azzali.

Tommaso Chimenti

Adelchi, Lenz Rifrazioni throws us into a terrible fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm

In the works of the Lenz Rifrazioni, it is more the silent, the unsaid, the so elaborate and dry that we arrive at an essence, a sublimation first of the word and then of the gesture. Reading between the lines, dismantling fragments, spacing within the lines projected within the fascinations, auditory and visual and sound, against that darkness, dangerous as a vortex, which cloaks and attracts like a wedge, sucks like a needle into the haystack. The latter “Adelchi”, which comes after “The Betrothed” last year (we are part of their “Natura Dèi Teatri” festival, now in its nineteenth edition), also suffers and enjoys the same peculiarities. As if there were no History, or as if history managed to pass through channels other than the classic ones of the relationship between audience and scene. The disturbance, discomfort, but also the elegance and refinement of an admittedly artistic, fully social, densely laboratorial path enters through the pores, governed by both the demands of actors and, at the same time, the recovery of certain mental pathologies. What a recovery is a wrong word in this context: we simply want (gigantic thought and infinity, constant effort) to enable some people to express themselves, through the universality of theater, roles, in the splitting of the character, to bring out what, with others, on the outside, in everyday life, is blocked, defused, still immobile, compressed, silenced. Theatre can do. All actors carry various psychic sensitivities, various disorders. It feels like we've ended up in Alice's hole, inside a terrible Brothers Grimm fairy tale. It's not so much the black that surrounds it but this solid, sticky patina of constant penumbra that tires the heart and retinas. There is an effort, desired, shared, accelerated, in trying to focus on figures dancing behind filters like curtains and gray partitions fluttering as they pass, in the heat of running around screens like sharks without prey, to be able to focus on a sparse and scanty object, to try to see what is missing, the invisible in the eardrum and the inaudible in the pupil. Go deep, dig. The works of Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto are disturbing, diabolical, brutal in their ferocity of exposition, sometimes cryptic and enigmatic, sometimes clean and simple visions smeared like flowers with the acrid smell of the end. Around the “battlefield” composed of three different “apartments”, scenes at the same time, paintings or exposed blocks, divided by transparent sheets, filters that on the one hand render a perspective that disorients and skids, on the other, by accumulation, it fades like a wireless telephone, superimposing it, changing its connotations as a slurred, nebulous, controversial bolo, opaque like wheat beer. The centrally planned agora-agora (there is something of a mass and catacomb ritual in all this) is enclosed by white sheets from which hands and noses emerge and point, and blind faces that, pressing from the outside, form Luciferian images that would like to break through the wall, violently intruding into the object with infernal Dantean force. Two moving figures create Dadaist racing and Futurist speed, while one sits in a dominant reigning position in an armchair-scrannus-throne. A rock and two joyful yet tragic moray eels marked by an inescapable fate. The tragedy, written almost two hundred years ago, is reduced here and by subtraction reaches four characters for three actors: Ermengarda (intense Carlotta Spaggiari) repudiated as a bride by Charlemagne, and Adelchi (good sidekick is Carlo Destro) son of the last Lombard king, the two Manzoni brothers, accomplices united by a marked fate paved with pain, pain, suffering. In the center is the monumental figure (Franck Berzieri, Charlemagne and Desiderius are incisive) in light blue pajamas for service and hospitalization, with tones of contempt and affection, greed and lust, screams and caresses. The dogs bark in the distance, their barking is sterile and pungent, imploring like that of the Pinocche Melampo. The Lenz put on another performance, a human installation of repeated gestures, of looping jokes, while in the videos behind them they tear dry red autumn leaves like bulldogs looking for the right smell to follow. In this mixture of enjoyment and shame, of forgiveness and defeat, hope has no solidarity or reason for citizenship; everything is soiled and damned in this Valley of tears, a birth that blends D'Annunzio's pleasure with Foscolo's pain, all the way to Leopardi's intimate suffering.

Daniele Rizzo

Adelchi- Natura Dèi Teatri 2014. Hope and Utopia

National premiere of the new production –by Lenz Rifrazioni – based on the production of the putative father of the Italian language: Manzoni's Adelchi, reinterpreted by Francesco Pititto and Maria Federica Maestri, will be performed as part of the Natura Dèi Teatri festival. After the impressive The Betrothed, Lenz's interest in language as a tool of culture and power once again confronts Alessandro Manzoni. What is borrowed, in this specific case, is the famous tragedy of Adelchi: the last prince of the Lombards, who died asking for clemency for his father from Charlemagne, to whom Desiderius himself had waged war to avenge the offended honor of his daughter Ermengarde. An unfinished literary and moral creature when seen from the perspective of the hypothetical perfection achieved by the Author in his major text (The Betrothed), because – deprived of the key presence (also from a narrative point of view) of divine providence – in Adelchi an invasive Jansenist pessimism prevails that distances any concrete possibility of spiritual reconciliation and synthesis between suffering and justice. A theological position characterized by the substantial denial of free will and by the idea of salvation only by the grace of God, to such a cumbersome point that our Author is forced to give shape to a human being so inevitably aimed at defeat («there is no innocent work: all that remains is to wrong, or suffer it»), as much as that of the Betrothed will be to success (according to Manzoni's religious reformulation of the relevant concepts). Therefore, a work deeply linked to the inevitability of suffering and the idea that the end of existence can never be happy. The violence of domination and the pain caused even to the innocent (like Ermengarda, married and repudiated for political purposes by her beloved Carlo); the possibility of a meaning in life reached only –and paradoxically – with and in death; the body and soul of women mortified and bent to the demands of (male) power; the individuality of consciousness succumbing to the Absolute Spirit of Reason of State; the fragmentation of existences and the fragmentation of communication are disruptive elements due to the opaque evidence and transparent emotionality with which they are presented to the public by Francesco Pititto and Maria Federica Maestri. In dramaturgical restitution, we will see, in fact, impossible games between brother and sister, broken voices between mother and daughter, metaphorical relationships between father and daughter, transfiguring projections placed between stage and stalls. Techniques that are only seemingly simple, but extremely complex to incorporate into the management of stage timing and dynamics, especially considering the sensibilities of the actors on stage, capable of inhabiting a set – of three linear and parallel spaces, divided by a transparent veil – as essential as it is symbolically dense in imprinting an overall visual perception of separation and laceration. An aesthetic analysis accurate from a conceptual and glacial point of view from an emotional one, which cannot ignore what is one of the many details, yet another, that makes Lenz Rifrazioni's artistic and existential project unique: the ability to bring together intutions and dramatic solutions of absolute value, such as the powerful Shakespearean echoes in the construction of Ermengarda's figure and the homogeneous coherence of the ensemble, with the opening of them beyond any delimiting definition into narrow artistic or therapeutic boundaries. The meaning of this performance is not theater, but neither is it rehabilitation; it is not interpretation, much less expression, that of the actors; it is not fiction or reality that the audience witnesses. What is admired –through the resounding quality of Carlotta Spaggiari, Carlo Destro, and Franck Berzieri– is the extraordinary synergy in the interminable horizon of life of a humanity that seeks itself and which, after exploring the paths made available by the norm (which would have them somewhere else in the back of its eyes), has been able to choose art to take and change shape. A manifestation that, without mimicking hypothetical normality or emphasizing an alien condition, simply offers itself, once again demolishing «the idea that a disabled person can/must approach the theatre only by making the authenticity of his or her condition invisible (that is, by finding for his or her otherness a credible place with respect to the unquestionable decision of those who take up the yardstick of normality)», as already mentioned regarding the fantastic work of Satyamo Hernandez (The Voices of Metamorphosis). It is theatre and it is rehabilitation; it is interpretation and it is expression; it is conscious fiction and it is immediate reality. It is exponential exposure to risk, a powerful manifestation of human shortcomings and the corresponding longing that determines them positively and not as an error. It is the most sublime example of what culture could be but is not in a way regulated by codes (written and oral) based on the canons of aggressive individualism (mors tua, vita mea). Therefore, it is the construction of a language (which has in Manzoni the most important exponent in Italian literature) as a model of power not disciplining and coercive, but anarchic and creative, whose attempt represents the intimate essence of Lenz Rifrazioni (who for over a decade has collaborated with Ausl of Parma – Integrated Mental Health Care Department, organizing permanent workshops aimed at people with special sensitivities and staging results of absolute artistic value). A utopia, probably, capable of reminding us that «the important thing is to learn to hope» (Ernst Bloch), that art finally manages to «introduce chaos into order», freeing us from (its) «lie of being truth» (Theodor Adorno). A utopia that is not ideological and all-encompassing, because it is not linked to dominant thought, but a practical and revolutionary experience of truly overcoming the alienation/loneliness of human beings through an authentic exercise of love for life in its vastness. Chapeau.