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 career of Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, because in the adolescent fury of the first appearances, in the suffering of youthful visions, in the mystical ecstasy of maturity the poetic ages of Lenz Foundation are reflected in an authentic portrait.
In the 2022 version the protagonist always remains Sandra Soncini - ‘extreme interpreter of the work -, accompanied by the 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 the mystical Lenzian 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 penance and the injustices of the world with prayer. The new version artistically translates the intensity of St. Catherine's spiritual praxis, transforming it into mystical reverberation of liberation and affirmation of the contemporary, undisciplined, diverse, irregular and marginal body.
In the dramaturgical invention, Catherine sinks into a distorted biographical landscape, where together with some figures assumed by the saint's hagiography, unexpected others appear, such as that of Correggio, who lived centuries later, in an exhilarating mixture of literary inaccuracies and historical misunderstandings typical of Romanticism German and Lenz's imaginative writing.
In the installation composed of ten lined washbasins in which the chromatic verb of the double face of Jesus flows – a very young young Christ in the Temple (1513) and a Head of Christ crowned with thorns (1521), the time of mystical action is sculpted: Catherine it is the phenomenon of God, traces of his presence are engraved in it. Holy action and divine contemplation are accomplished in twelve trials, each revealing the matter and space of the epiphany. The work is a succession of arduous sanctifying practices that lead Catherine to bliss. The heavenly bride, a penitent lamb, takes breath, saliva and ointment from Jesus in the full fulfillment of the scourge.
Catherine's body, nourished only by the host and blood, asks in a high-pitched voice to belong to the unclean of excess and to return to the otherworld of her infantile nature. Blessed because she has no food, blessed because she is quenched by her own spit, blessed because she is dirty and without dignity. Catherine drowns in the kingdom of youth with livid and swollen veins, of queens with protruding bones, of schoolchildren of eternal regurgitation. Little Caterina wants to die. He wants to die in the theater. And the theater must die in Caterina, becoming itself cold, silent and rigid. His resurrection is in the truth of the body, without identity, without will, without necessity, free to be the red strawberry of God.
IMAGOTURGY OF THE SAINT, THE PAINTER AND THE STRAWBERRY
Francesco Pititto
Already in the first version by Catharina von Siena in 1987 the scenic space contained images. They were live filmed sequences of Pina Bausch's Café Müller, a visual representation of the choreographic Passion of dance and theater that opened a new perspective of language and artistic research. The irreducible holiness of Catherine and the irreducible creative ethics of Pina.
Then, in 2003 for the first version of La vita è dream da Calderón de la Barca the pictorial image, in particular of the Pietà by Antonello da Messina – Christ in mercy and an angel - taken up in the Prado, established itself as a decisive aesthetic/ecstatic element of dramaturgy. A transfiguration into a female body became the refraction of the painting, composed of life and then reconverted into an image. At that time I invented the neologism “imagoturgy”, the image was living writing, as much as the body of the att* on stage.
Antonello's Pietà and the Pietà del Teatro, beauty and harshness, humanity and animality of the senses, of reason and reason.
The figure of Christ, his face-body and the angel would assist us in different creative and poetic research ages.
_ein Engel hinmuß, der die Bälge hochreißt.
Engel und Puppe: dann ist endlich Schauspiel.
an angel comes to put the puppets straight.
Angel and puppet: now it's the theater.
Rainer Maria Rilke, da “Die vierte Elegie”
In this remise-en-act of Catharina by JMRLenz the face of Christ returns, like the young Christ in the Temple and the Face of Christ by Correggio, to interpenetrate in the face/head of Saint Catherine's relic. What remains of its material and mortal shell.
A beyond death to rejoin the Beloved, finally out of the physical body and miserable human temptations. The liquid of suffering, the colored fluids of illness and pain of the flesh, so similar to the chromaticism of the paintings, is poured onto the image lying on the ground. Almost as if to fill the veiled and fake color of the silhouette of light with real matter, as if to add electromagnetic waves which, having reached the brain's sensors, determine its vision and end.
Finally, the strawberry, the fake fruit that contains the real fruit which are then the small yellow seeds that are the achenes, the strawberry, the only one to interpenetrate the seed and show it on the outside, expose it without shame, all immersed in the red blood of its color. All immersed in the fleshy, voluptuous and protective body of a strawberry the size of the Universe.
