Gazzetta di Parma
Valeria Ottolenghi
Left by Aeneas in despair: «Dido» as l’ Africa
It inspired poets, painters, sculptors, musicians Dido, queen abandoned by the Trojan hero whom fate called elsewhere, she committed suicide in the fire while the sails carried her beloved away. But in Lenz's «Dido», inspired by Ovid, with other poetic fragments – including Dante – this female figure, the dark-coloured skin, ends up representing the entire African continent and Aeneas the white conqueror (many precise references to Mussolini and the colonial enterprise), albeit in a more complex dialectic of metamorphosis and exchanges. Bodies are confronted, often in their exposed nudity, also by age, he is older, and by color, in complex games of multiple reflections.
Preview of Lenz's new creation, now presented in Parma as part of Parmapoesia, «Dido» – by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, starring Valentina Barbarini and Giuseppe Barigazzi, music by Andrea Azzali – traverses time and history, with films that also show ports and cities of the present.
High transparent walls. She plays with a tire. The images –always of a special preciousness– show fragility, she evoking the lost gaze of the resigned desolation in African poverty, he the years that have passed, so many decades that the body remembers. Some of her postures are particularly beautiful, as she appears almost sculptural in the shots, her body as if elongated.
Disguises. And sexuality is also a reason for mirroring, for exchanging identities. She will smear herself with white powder and kiss him, her lips red, who in the meantime had painted his hair black: metamorphoses possible? There doesn't seem to be a psychological dimension but a planetary one.
The videos also scroll multiplied on the ground. She will have a book in her hand as the presence of fire is felt. Cities to build with colored blocks. Finally, the woman, with the bull's head, will not recognize that pile of green plastic as food. They are/ we are inextricably linked men and women, past and present, black and white, states and continents, young and old: and with «Dido» in Lenz it seemed to feel intense the dark feeling of despair.