Aeneis in Italy

Giada Russo

Inside the Ovule

In the imaginative universe of the directing duo Maestri–Pititto, it is the words and the body of Pasolini that permeate the entire work with meaning. Particularly in the second part, through the final three episodes—#10 Various Attacks, #11 The Little Girl, #12 Merciless?—his critique of bourgeois civilization is conveyed through the actors’ altered bodies, transformed into objects. Plaster busts, severed and faceless, burst onto the stage: corpses on a battlefield that have lost all identity.

Alongside the images, recorded voices from both the Italian right and left reverberate through the space, together with stadium chants in which political allegiances were once proclaimed without restraint. Swastikas and Celtic crosses emerge in the spectators’ minds. The work speaks of recent history while never abandoning an abstract, timeless dimension—a non-place that all of us have inhabited, some through memory, others through stories passed down.

Massimo Marino

Aeneis in Italy: the triumph of death

Blood and more blood, of innocent victims, of guilty warriors. Old people who incite struggle and young people who burn lives for an idea. The Red of Italy tells the story of Lenz Rifrazioni in Aeneis in Italia, a series of short shows inspired by the latest books of Virgil's Aeneid, brought together in a single evening to conclude the festival.

Lenz's is, as always, an anti-narrative spectacle, made up of suggestions and leaps, of refined and searing images and bodies in perpetual motion, here dressed and naked like ancient warriors, thrown to the ground, undone by chthonic landscapes, by plant concrescences, stretched out on pictorial carpets of still lifes, living elements ready to eat, destroy vomit parts of the background… The company presents the completion of the project dedicated to the poem celebrating the Augustan Empire in its industrial space on Via Pasubio, which is at dire risk of demolition, in an area of Parma already transformed into a semi-desert by recent renovation projects by governments shipwrecked in debt and political and moral failure. As always in the works of Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, admirable for their visionary coherence and for their contempt for conventions and simplifications, the poem is only a starting point for associating, dissecting, recalling and revoking, reflecting on a long trail of blood that from antiquity, through the monumental celebration of the Ara Pacis, is transmitted to us and intersects with recent fratricidal struggles, up to the terrorism of the years ’70. Without ever any concessions to petty news or linear narration.

The scene is wrapped in projections, which recreate an environment equivalent to the crypt of the Ara Pacis, the monument to the Augustan pacification. Around, the blood of bodies wasted in struggles, reddened by tutu-like skirts, shaved as survivors of marginalized worlds, as prisoners, as survivors of homes of restraint, as soldiers of ever-lost wars. A rolled-up mattress, at the beginning, some straw chairs, precarious stands recall Aeneas' arrival in Italy in search of a home, the alliances and the subsequent struggles, to then launch into connections with the Years of Lead and other military marches, while one of the characters stands as an old inciter to battle with falling flesh, an Augustan statue on the imperial forums, which will recall other flames, another red, another blood, and then other statuary groups recreated during the emotional performance, a procession of torsos without heads, arms, or legs lined up as an army and then thrown at each other in absurd battle, intertwining bodies that bend and intertwine, stretch out, writhe, and finally reveal a grotesque, distorted sculptural group reminiscent of the Capitoline she-wolf that feeds the twins Romulus and Remus.

In the midst of so much red, images of a nature of stone, lava, plant efflorescence and mineral concretions follow one another, mobile chthonic sculpture for projections that opens up to landscapes of fruit and vegetables where the bodies of the young contenders are stretched out until they tear fruit to pieces and reject its flesh, tear parasites from their chests to bleed, in baroque figurations, from the triumph of death, from a nature so lush that it borders on inevitable putrefaction.

Among the enveloping images, the permanent meaning is that of struggle, of blood, the absurdity of the conquest of that soil identified in the folded mattress, which opens up to provide contrasted soil and bed, of pressing and senseless marches, of tense fists, raised hands, of swords and desperation, of youthful camaraderie and gratuitous violence, rape, torture of bodies rendered inert as things, torn apart, dismembered, abandoned.

The actors are at the end bundled with rags that erase them, then naked again, while a black shadow swallows the background and the scene into nothingness of a hole of antimatter, antivita, which is the triumph of the massacre, ancient and modern, of Aeneas against the Latins and of Mara Cagol against the state and of the state against Mara Cagol, of a mangled young deer and of sacrificed adolescent bodies, up to the final sculptures evoking a dubious grandeur, in a show that always keeps you on the edge of your chair with its intellectual and emotional challenges, and in the end it grabs you, conquers you unconditionally, with the corpses still displayed as if on one of those ancient trolleys of the Greek theatre that emerged from the royal doors after the massacres had been committed, while an unbearable grey air spreads everywhere, and social order is exalted as a guarantee of transgression, the happiness that only difference gives. Valentina Barbarini, Roberto Riseri, and Pierluigi Tedeschi, all extolling in their unconditional dedication to the demanding, exhausting directorial design, while Guglielmo Gazzelli's old body appears on video, and the actions and images conceived by Pititto and installed by Maestri dialogue incessantly with the live sounds of Andrea Azzali.

Rossella Menna

From “Aeneis in Italy” by Lenz Refractions of Lazyblood's metal: Natura Dèi Teatri is tinged red and black

On stage, in numerous moments, naked, battered, raped bodies, deprived of the identity of a child or girl. They are nothing but cannon fodder, destined to unravel, to decompose, to become food for worms, one with the earth that welcomes their rot. While on stage the battle unfolds between anonymous fighters reduced to light white Styrofoam busts thrown into the fray without even wearing a uniform, on the screens, the projected images show human anatomies mixed with the earth and its fruits, as in a livid still life by Caravaggio. From the mouths vomit, from the hands rivulets of blood fluid exploded by juicy red fruits. The bucolic landscape crossed by Aeneas becomes the open-air cemetery of an abandoned battlefield.

The erasure of human pity towards the pierced enemy generates cooled, dehumanized anatomies, faceless and nameless bodies, unknown soldiers. No difference between man and woman. The actress is bald and naked, the two actors are bald and naked. Even the myth of the Wolf is expressed in a voracious meal of death. From small, exhausted breasts of a petite, dried-up mother, two already male children feed, larger and stronger than the mother's body that gave birth to them.

It is a war fought without swords and without rifles, a violence rendered through an exploded, material, raped word, forcefully hurled towards an indefinite elsewhere by scratched voices prolonged in the extreme effort of saying. A poetic word, however, that becomes the only digital imprint, the only tension towards redemption, the only distinctive sign of that identity so violently torn away by a war that amalgamates stories and lives into a river of indistinct blood.

And it is precisely the poetic word that physically extends towards the viewer, but, even before that, a poetry of the scene that rejects the symmetry of meaning become the only keys to an access, however partial, to the iconographic universe, to the powerful images, to the pastiche of sounds, verses, quotations of a complex work, which regenerates and generates new meaning in each scene, becoming elusive yet perceptible in its entirety, in its black flow.

Giuseppe Distefano

Lenz Refractions in Parma with the Aeneid of our time, between Pasolini and the Red Brigades

To call it just a show would be an understatement. In addition to all the theatrical and performative elements, incorporating visual and installation art, with the electronic processing of the sound score, a soul flows through it, and a profound thought, perceptible in the involvement of the mind and senses. And there is a great epic breath in this dazzling scenic synthesis of the ”Aeneid” by the Lenz Rifrazioni company. An enucleation born from an intelligent excavation of the literary epic; one that seeks, and finds, in the interstices of the present, unpublished references and connections. “Aeneis in Italy” is the continuation of a performative and visual project that the Parma company, passionately directed by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, has been carrying out for two years around Virgil's epic poem. The story of the occupation of Lazio by Aeneas, a precursor of the Roman people, and the rebellion of the young Turnus who disobeyed the new order, is traced by the two authors and directors to our very recent time: the mournful night of the 1970s. The years of the rhetoric of conflict, of yesterday as of today, of modern fighters; of the years of lead; of the search for a homeland and a new Europe; of the violence of the streets and massacres; of the generation of fathers against their children, and vice versa; of youth riots for freedom; of the prophecies of poets. And Pasolini enters it not only as a quote, but as a dramatic and textual element, as well as a visual one (from the film “Salò”), which intersects the times of the Red Brigades, of fascist emphasis, of Christian Democratic power. Twelve episodes feature true stage epiphanies with just three performers (father, brother, fighter, companion, victim, daughter, wife, sister) swallowed up in a darkness broken by lights and velars that magnify and multiply three-dimensionally characters projected across the board, amidst choreographic gestures, sculptural postures, and declamatory voices amidst whispers and shouts. On the recessed screen, in the abstract floating of images and sound, the silhouette of a deer –whose killing was the pretext for the outbreak of war– is dyed red. From then on, in that place of idealistic plots, with an armchair, three chairs, a table, and a mattress that also serves as a raft, among busts scattered across the battle scene, a brandished sword, manly embraces, and exposed obscenities, fragments of political and civil history evoked with poetic synthesis follow one another. And the sequence of the Roman she-wolf is powerful, for its voluptuousness and disturbing references, recreated by the three actors with the two men attached to the woman's breasts with the she-wolf's head, while voices of stadium chants seem to incite further violence. They are soulless human machines, without pathos, without identity, without history. A generation without gods. Without God.

Giuseppe Distefano

Aeneis in Italy. Interview with Lenz Refractions

What need did this project on the Aeneid arise from?

Our work is a process of grafting: dramaturgies anticipate vision in a circular dynamic in which what will happen has already happened. The performative research on the Aeneid is grafted onto the trace of the previous creation dedicated to Ovidian Dido. Dido represents the mythical body of Africa, conquered, enjoyed, and abandoned by the Western hero Aeneas, founder of Rome and the new empire, a prelude to the future horrors that Fascist Italy would bring to Africa with the conquest of Ethiopia in 1936. It is no coincidence, in fact, in the years ‘30 within the reappropriation of the myth of the Roman Empire for the use of Mussolini's rhetoric, Dido was demonized as a woman symbol of the continent prey. In Aeneis in Italy we have therefore continued to artistically rework the rhetorics that accompany Aeneas on his journey to refound his homeland in a critical interpretation of the iconology of the potentate and dominance. We wanted to come to terms “with” a membership that was certainly not only geographical, but historical and political. “We are the one we hate most: the never-defeated father of our origin. We are inexorably children –on the run– of Italian history, and until we recognize its initial motion, we will never understand its now – low, vulgar, rhetorical, violent.

What was the initial, and subsequent, approach to the staging?

Install ancient sacrifices and new gods on the contemporary ceremony table. In the first six chapters, we wanted to diagnose, visualize, and physicalize the fundamental generative constraints: 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, violence against dying animals, the neuroleptic transit into the afterlife, in a skeletal epic without consolation. In the second six chapters – a long sequence of massacres and blood – it was necessary to erase the past to exist only in the present: no ceremony of remembrance, no father to hate, no lover to abandon, no mother to desire, no past and no future, only one ‘above’ bloodied by the rhetoric of conflict, only the anonymous, cruel and pathos-free present.

In the show, Aeneas intertwines with Pasolini, with the Red Brigades, with the Years of Lead, with the rhetoric of war without heroes…

Like the doe mortally wounded by Ascanius on the banks of the Tiber, the identityless generation of the Years of Lead, pierced by the disappointment of post-Resistance revisionism, runs wild in the struggle against power. Only the mangled body of Pier Paolo Pasolini, like a princess destined for sacrifice, a tearful Lavinia stained with the mud of those same shores on which History began millennia ago, overcomes the horror of oblivion and leaves with its poetic groan its eternal sign of pity and beauty. In his poetic testament Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma – a work that strongly inspired our creation – Pasolini prophesies the advent of a new form of fascism in Italian history, which through the social control of bodies imposes violence and vulgarity, commodification and massifying oppression of bodies. In Aeneis in Italy we have ‘exposed’ in tragic oscillation the horror of the young mass murderers of the Red Brigades and the fascist physics of the criminal power that kills Pier Paolo Pasolini.

[...]

Andrea Porcheddu

Lenz Rifrazioni: la ricerca del contemporaneo

What do we talk about when we talk about contemporary theatre? It seems like a Carverian title, or a doubt of Monsieur Lapalisse.

To want to dismiss the issue quickly, in two minutes, three words are enough: the theatre that is being built in our time. It's eight words, but less than two minutes.

But if you look closely, it's a trick question.

The other night I went to Parma. I hadn't been back for many years. The occasion was a double invitation from the Lenz Rifrazioni company. The group, known by all as Lenz, led by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, has been an undisputed protagonist of Italian theatrical research for years. His language, often extreme, always conceptual, does not exclude comparison with harsh physicalities – what Romeo Castellucci called the “forgotten beauties” – that is, that broad, often marginal humanity that experiences the dynamics of diversity.

Lenz's research, in short, which has always been in that beautiful theater created with courage and dedication in an industrial warehouse, is deeply rooted in the tensions and contradictions of our time.

There were, therefore, two shows. The first is a monologue, entrusted to the excellent Sandra Soncini, which traverses the myth of Penthesilea in Kleist's compositional vertigo. A monologue inexorably delivered in front of the Mac screen, which multiplies and enlarges the close-up at the bottom. Penthesilea alone with herself, an unarmed queen, torments herself in chat: until she devours her own myth like a glass of water. It is a story that becomes delirium, obsession, self-dialogue of those who desperately search in the glare of the screen for traces of life, help, listening.

Then, a more complex and complex work, Aeneis in Italy, which sinks into the Aeneid like a knife, drawing from it a bitterly Italian essence, capable of uniting the legend of Rome's founding father with the armed struggle of the 1970s.

Lenz has done a long, multi-year journey through Virgil's work, divided into chapters corresponding to the books of the Aeneid, precisely to reflect on the founding myths of the “Fatherland” (the quotation marks, given the Italian situation, seem obligatory to me).

I saw the last chapters –from 7 to 12– entrusted to three naked bodies, veneered in white, two men and a woman. They play, fight, quarrel, clash, jump, dance, speak. They are shrill, amplified by the dark sound –elaborated live by Andrea Azzali– which makes the Aeneid a score of suffering, a mythical story that instead tells of bestiality, violence, oppression. In the eternal return of the equal of an Italian woman always devastated, gray, vulgar.

After the evocative and disturbing Hamlet in the enormous space of the Farnese Theatre, Lenz continues to reshuffle the cards of the classic and the myth, radically reforming the canon in the spirit of the contemporary.

That, then, is why I wondered what contemporary was and when contemporary theatre ceases to be such.

Can we say, trivially, that theatre is contemporary with itself, with its time? Here, doubt creeps in. Those who deal with contemporary art know that it ultimately has to do with the question of Time. Federico Ferrari remembers him very well, in the introduction to a nimble volume with the significant title of “Del contemporaneo“. Theatre seems to be contemporary almost by definition: how many times have we heard of hic et nunc, that is, of being present and alive precisely at the moment when two communities –that of the actors and that of the spectators– meet. The gaze, the body, the word are the connoting elements of that being present at the scenic event, which is therefore a shared time. But that does not solve the initial question. What is contemporary theatre and why it has to do with time. Ferrari remembers that we, we human species, are in time: we are born entering time and we die leaving it. It is, essentially, to paraphrase Malraux, the “human condition”. So much so that all philosophers –from Parmenides to Heidegger to Nieztsche to George Agamben– have questioned the founding question, what is time: the fulcrum of philosophical thought and therefore the fulcrum of artistic thought and practice. From this perspective – I summarize and make Ferrari's thoughts my own, I hope the author will forgive me – the “classics” sit on the edge of time, and wait for the fashions, trends, and frenzies of the moment to pass. They bear eternal values and canons – some would say archetypes –, which eternally return. On the other hand, however, contemporary art: the new that advances, that dives into time, and tells it, tireless in its changing, changing being.

Are they dichotomous forms? Conflictual? Yes, they often are. The classic loses sight of the real, certainly contemporary it ages immediately. But finally there is another way of being classical and contemporary: a way in which the ferment renews the classical and the classical confirms the ferment. Today we live in a time of accelerated theatre: in duration, in production, in enjoyment. Thomas Ostermeier, to whom we owe this definition, tells us well: it is a theatre that thrives on communicative and social acceleration and at the same time contributes to reflecting on the present time. Yet in this acceleration, the theatre has not lost sight of its relationship with Time. I like to take up, in this regard, a now famous definition by Agamben on the contemporary: «a contemporary is someone who does not actually coincide with his time nor adapt to his claims and is, therefore, in this sense, inactual. But precisely through this discard and this anachronism, he is more capable than others of perceiving and grasping time».

So, what is contemporary theatre. That theater “outside” of the present time for a small, slight phase shift. A point of view, a perspective, a narrative ability. Jean Luc Nancy tells us, in the same libretto cited, that contemporary works therefore not only force us to take that transversal gaze on ourselves and our time, but also push us, always again, to ask ourselves the incessant question of what contemporary is. That is, through our gaze – which is a curved gaze, which returns to us through the gaze of the actor – the contemporary imposes on us the question of what is the art, that is, the theatre, that we are experiencing, that is, what is the world, and the society that we are experiencing. With Lenz Rifrazioni, with other Italian companies and groups, this happens.