The hieroglyphic verses of Fenix, daughter of the King of Morocco in The Constant Prince (1636) by Calderón de la Barca, constitute the subtle dramaturgical and conceptual filaments of Flowers like stars?
Interpreting the existential fever, the psychotic euphoria, the self-destructive will of the young Fenix - a figure/sister anticipating the black angels of Jean Genet and Sarah Kane - is Valentina Barbarini, Lenz's iconic actress.
The Imminent Past (Il Passato Imminente) is a four-year project of site-specific performative, choreographic, visual and sound installations created in the monumental spaces of the Pilotta Complex in Parma conceived and directed by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto in collaboration with the musician Claudio Rocchetti.
The project consists of the contemporary installation of the works of Pedro Calderón de La Barca: the autos sacramentales The Great Theatre of the World (Il Grande Teatro del Mondo, 2018) and La vida es sueño (2019) modern translation of religious festivals of the seventeenth century Spanish and in 2020 three solos inspired by the works of the Spanish author. To culminate in 2021 with Life is a Dream (La Vita è Sogno), a pivotal work of Western theatre staged in the historical-rural landscape of the Valserena Abbey
The first part of the three-year project was carried out between the large rooms of the Neoclassical Gallery and in the Farnese Theatre; over twenty artists, including performers from the Lenz ensemble and harpsichordists from the Arrigo Boito Conservatory in Parma, gave substance to the scenic rewriting of the visions of the Great Theater of the World.
The second chapter was set up in the new north wing of the National Gallery, where the precious baroque collection is preserved. An impressive installation of hospital beds dialogued with the functional structures designed in the seventies by the architect Canali and the sacred depictions of Lanfranco, Schedoni, Spada, Ribera, Murillo, van Dyck.
The third chapter of the Imminent Past consists of three solos inspired by Calderón's works: Life is a Dream and The Constant Prince. Set in the magnificent industrial-origin spaces of Lenz Teatro they are played by the ensemble's historical actresses.
The fourth part of the project was carried out within the historical-rural landscape of the Abbey of Valserena, or Abbey of San Martino dei Bocci, commonly known as the Certosa di Paradigna, a former Cistercian abbey with Gothic and Baroque forms located in Paradigna, a hamlet on the northern outskirts of Parma. Founded in 1298 and deconsecrated in 1810, it has been home to the CSAC – Communication Study Center and Archive of the University of Parma since 2007
The stage installation of Flowers like stars? it draws free inspiration from the sixteenth-century Abbess's Chamber, in the former Monastery of San Paolo in Parma, famous for having been frescoed by Correggio. The magnificent decorations of the vault, innervated by obscure philosophical-mythological correspondences, arcane sentences of an ancient language, are transposed into concrete devices of a burning contemporary meditatio vitae.
Alongside the other disturbing Calderonian figures, Rosaura from Life is a Dream, Semiramide from The Daughter of the Air, Angela from The Charming Lady and Julia from The Devotion of the Cross Fenix from The Constant Prince participates in the dissonant poetic chorus of the dramatic structure of the greatest author of Spanish Baroque theatre.
Flowers like stars? Flowers like stars?: displacement, deviation, deviation, drift towards a world that is not a mirroring of the aesthetic-moral universe of Calderón. Escape from the baroque and escape from the convention of the dramaturgy of suffering of The Constant Prince, a masterpiece which, reread and transduced by Grotowski, re-founded the theater of the second half of the twentieth century.
Valentina Barbarini, young but no longer very young, merges with the irreducible function of demand: the anxiety of unanswered demand fully corresponds to its being both iconic and solitary, strong and very fragile. The stage system envelops it, the “veils” it: it superimposes additional filters on it, screenings that blur the sharpness of a possible answer to the one unanswered question: Is God Man?
At the opening of The Constant Prince there is a fundamental guiding verse for tracing the work: “I only know that I know how to feel what I don't know”. It is the question of every awakening: it is the disturbance of clearly perceiving that the sensitive is in itself a condition of bewilderment, a volatile identity, irreducible to enlightening knowledge. Fenix's is a rarefied emotional physiognomy, which overflows into a woman's infinite ability not to correspond to herself and her reasonable existential dynamics. Valentina started working with us at seventeen, today she is thirty-five: a long journey, in which with total adhesion she embodied the artistic figuration of indecision, of subtraction, of refusal to plan daily action. It is the body and thought of a moral theater that rejects fiction and sentimentality.
From Il Principe costante by Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Translation, dramaturgy, imagoturgy Francesco Pititto
Installation, direction, costumes Maria Federica Maestri
Performer Valentina Barbarini
Music Claudio Rocchetti
Curating Elena Sorbi
Organization Ilaria Stocchi
Communication, press office, promotion Michele Pascarella
Technical care Alice Scartapacchio
Technical assistant Marco Cavellini
Media video Doruntina Film
Production Lenz Fondazione
Emanuela Zanon
Lenz Teatro restarts with RE-Opening Mondi Nuovi
Valentina Barbarini's muscular and androgynous body moves in a stage installation freely inspired by the Chamber of the Abbess frescoed by Correggio in the former Monastery of San Paolo in Parma, whose cryptic-mythological correspondences are translated into ephemeral images and boneless words projected on veil screens.
Daniele Rizzo
Contemporary Baroque / RE-Opening New worlds
The performative construction is radical but, although constantly showing the tension to risk, the body is never reduced to mechanics –as often happens in sterile compositions passed off as contemporary art – and inhabiting the scene is never from a passive shell, despite the stage ecology forcing it to continuous genuflections from which stoically it will be increasingly complex to rise again
