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Aeneis #3 The Lung

Aeneid Project 2011_2012


Lenz Rifrazioni's race towards classical literary texts continues with the twelve-episode rewriting of Publius Virgil Maro's Aeneid. The new performative and visual project inspired by the great epic poem of Virgil, the greatest interpreter of Latin classicism, is grafted onto Dido - the latest creation dedicated to Ovid. Made for the filmic part in the allegorical landscapes crossed by Aeneas during the founding journey of Latinity, the creation takes as its body of investigation the rhetorical figures of Virgil's epic, in a critical interpretation of the iconology of the potentate and dominance.


In this major performance project, Lenz's visions merged with the sounds of four musicians from the international electronic scene: Lillevan, Paul Wirkus, OvO and Andrea Azzali-Monophon, who performed the individual episodes live.

The project

The Aeneid (Aeneis), an epic poem in twelve books composed between 29 BC and 19 BC, is a monumental work, considered by contemporaries to be a Latin iliad. It was the official Book sacred to the ideology of the regime of Augustus, sanctioning the origin and divine nature of imperial power.


AENEIS

  • #1 LA CORSA DEL CINGHIALE
  • #2 MI SOTTOPONGO AL PESO
  • #3 IL POLMONE
  • #4 I DRAGHI
  • #5 DI QUALI PENE E TORTURE
  • #6 CARNI ARROSTITE
  • #7 IL COMPENSO
  • #8 GRIGIO PIOMBO
  • #9 NIPOTI
  • #10 VARI ATTACCHI
  • # 11 LA PICCINA
  • #12 SPIETATO?


These are the titles of the twelve episodes that make up the creation of Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, a contemporary visual and performative work installed on Virgil's epic monument. Made for the filmic part in the allegorical landscapes crossed by Aeneas during the founding journey of Latinity, the creation takes as its body of investigation the rhetorical figures of the epos virgilino, in a critical interpretation of the iconology of the potentate and dominance.

In the perimeter space of the Ara Pacis, a celebratory and propagandistic monument erected in the Campus Martius between 13 and 9 BC to glorify the Augustan victories and, during the Fascist years, the site of the gymnastic exercises of Roman youth - exactly reproduced from the installation, the first six ceremonial paintings inspired by the Aeneid are drawn. The walls of the stage enclosure are decorated with the visual friezes of the film sequences in substantial formal fidelity to the narrative structure of the friezes of the Ara Pacis, an explicit ornamental redundancy that connects the imperial present and Aeneas, the mythical progenitor of the Roman lineage.

But on the table of the contemporary ceremony, other sacrifices are consumed and other gods are honored: the cruelty of a demented pater, the horror of maternal love, the torment of old age, the grotesque brutality of the familia, the horror of bodies in erotic constraint, the violence against dying animals, the neuroleptic transit into the afterlife, materialize in a skeletal epic without consolation.

Introduzione

#3 IL POLMONE


In The Lung, an old man alone on stage on the edge of the end. Giancarlo Ilari, an actor with a long artistic life, intones Anchises's requiem in a contemporary explosion that empties the agony and horror of old age of all rhetoric and lyricism.


From lung to breath. The lung carries oxygen to the blood and removes carbon dioxide, then throws it back into the air.

A mosaic of small cells, the alveoli, then the lung stops, the breath stops the eye closes to the companions and tomorrow does not exist the sail falls, the wind is over.

Contemporary odyssecular impulse, impulsive force in a very short time, shock, aesthetic explosion with an echo of ancient rumble resonates in today, stubborn and low and chorus of laments:

"now every breath puts fear and shakes every sound/in anxiety and fear/for one's partner and one's burden."

Burden of lightness, burden of bearing the weight of a life, or several lives, spaceless journey lent to the will of wind and waves.

Epos of Men. Always in the same sea, each head an Aeneas fleeing from cities and burning Dido to refound the right to life, bodies without a homeland in search of a homeland without bodies.

And then the Dogs. They watch over earthen tombs purging moods and smells, they crouch beside their recently dead master growling at death, the homeland is that pile of earth. Contaminated, cracked, silly.

But until the molecules dissolved in the air, millions of olfactory cells, and the smallest odoriferous particles flow into their nostrils then the buried master will still be their old Anchises.

The worst for me is over.

Paul Wirkus, author of the live performance of A #3 The Lung, considered one of the greatest exponents of contemporary electronic music, was born in Poland in 1967 and lives in Cologne. Since 1990 he has been acclaimed as a composer of minimal electronics and improvisation and has received prestigious international awards. His work has been appreciated and reviewed by magazines such as the English "The Wire" and "Pitchfork Media", the German "DE:BUG" and "Spex" and others. He played live at the Sonar Festival in Barcelona, Musique Volantes in Paris, the c/o pop Festival in Cologne, Les Urbaines in Lausanne, and the Wien Modern in Vienna.

Immagini

Media

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Credits

live music performance | Paul Wirkus

creation | Francesco Pititto | Maria Federica Maestri

imagoturgy | Francis Pititto

installation | Maria Federica Maestri

performer | Giancarlo Ilari

light design | Gianluca Bergamini

assistant director | Elena Sorbi

production | Ilaria Montanari

Press

Corriere della Sera


Massimo Marino

Controscene


An elderly man abandoned on a hospital bed or perhaps a morgue bed. A text in three languages that flows projected into the gray room. He remembers The Aeneid, the death of his father Anchises. Image like Mantegna's Dead Christ. Tubes and tubes. Fog.

Contemporary theatre usually plays on two different levels. Either the immersive one or the alienating one, which breaks down and discusses the elements of the show. Lenz Rifrazioni follows an original path, in which immersion is achieved through decomposition, betrayal, reinvention of structured, literary source materials. In this edition of the now historic Natura dèi Teatri festival, included last year in the Parma festival network InContemporanea, it presents not a new show but various stages of deciphering and recreating Virgil's poem, a different episode each time. The one I witnessed is the third, Aeneis #3. The lung, marked by the breath of the dying old Anchises, who in the first episode had been split into the god Jupiter.

On stage is an actor of long navigation and dense skill like Giancarlo Ilari, one of the historic names of the Cut and then of the Collective of Parma, born in 1927. A fragile and powerful presence, desolate and darting.

Directors Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto dissect, as usual, the elements of the show: the text becomes, in this case, projection (as well as reinvention), a graphic sign as well as a word. The movement in search of (last) breath of the almost corpse rising from the bed becomes dragged towards opaque thresholds, with an empty leash. Enter another of the festival's strands, us and the dogs, and the animals, with phrases that recall the dog's ability to feel its owner even under the mound of earth in the tomb.

Another of the characteristics of the cycle is the particular attention paid to sound creation, each time entrusted to a different artist: in this case, Paul Wirkus's live musical performance immerses him even more in a final atmosphere of irremediable nostalgia. The face projects, like the amplified breath of the performer, fringes in silent memories and introspections, in a desolate hand-to-hand fight with death trying to kidnap air from elusive life.


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