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Gnostic Apocalypses

Holy Scriptures Project 2021 ~ 2024


The Gnostic Apocalypses announce with image-words the advent of another human_non-human wisdom, without age, without order, without will, a Sophia that invites us to walk the path of linguistic paradox to return to the root and be guided in the storms of the matter of the present by a ‘female born of the female’.

The project

The Holy Scriptures

Four-year Dramaturgical and Visual Culture Project 2021_2024


After The Creation (2021), Numbers (2022) and Apocalypse (2023), Gnostic Apocalypses continues the search for the revelation of the apocalyptic writings, giving scenic body to some Nag Hammadi Codes, an ancient textual treasure of recent and casual discovery (Egypt, 1945), built with dark and flashing narrative sequences, full of cryptic, radical and burning images, which indicate unknown paths to reach new knowledge.


The reason for Lenz's research into the folds of the Gnostic codes, whose dating dates back to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, lies in the need to be narrated by a different apocalyptic - so already processed by past and present history - to be ‘enlightened’ by a new and divergent revelation.


The Gnostic Apocalypses announce with image-words the advent of another human_non-human wisdom, without age, without order, without will, a Sophia that invites us to walk the path of linguistic paradox to return to the root and be guided in the storms of the matter of the present by a ‘female born of the female’. The Apocalypses of Adam, Peter, James and Paul represent an inexhaustible and powerful dramaturgical and imagoturgical source, beyond the multiple philosophical and theological interpretations, since they can be traced back to the reality of the world we live in, to the human condition of every single human being.


The currents of ideas inspired by Gnosticism are part of the contemporary collective imagination, they have produced art over time - from William Blake to John Milton -, while the female figure in the Pistis Sophia (Faith Wisdom), becomes the object of surprising dramaturgical research, considering that the authority, faculty of asking and presence of women does not appear in any other ancient religious writing. In particular, Mary Magdalene, the human incarnation of knowledge - gnosis - speaks sixty-seven times, receives the praises of Jesus, explains the passages that the male Apostles do not understand and in the Gnostic vision represents the Bride and female counterpart of Christ.

Introduzione

THE FINE TIP OF THE SOUL

Francesco Pititto


The battlefield of the imagination is as wide as the universe, the seismic rumble that overwhelms every boundary of reality reaches the pinnacle of a concert of light and darkness where everything seems to stop, the mutant forms and the space around, in unison with the astonishing electromagnetic waves.

Then the Lamb comes, and time stands still, as on the event horizon.


This thought introduced the Apocalypse of John into Lenz's vision and with the Gnostic Apocalypses that horizon will be crossed, when you swallow in the vortex of the dark underbelly will be all the wonderful lights of the catastrophic battles and perspectives of the new world that the work revealed to mortal beings.

From the other exit of the great dark cave, even brighter are images of other worlds, other universes, colossal matter and energy re-emerge, the set of aeons, the fullness and totality of divine powers, the discovery of the light of truth, the Pleroma as a great unlimited white hole from which new divine entities are expelled, emanated and not generated.


Imagination, knowledge, philosophy appropriate new archetypes, the original texts become complex alchemical, mysterious compounds, the verb becomes cryptic and requires new revelations, new apostolic witnesses and prophecies.

In the new apocalyptic time of gnosis the crossing of the imaginal reflections/visions that make up the archaic world and the new worlds are not for everyone. Only those who have the “end point of the soul” or “the angel in the soul” can access it. Only those who make the dream real will be saved.

New figures emerge, one in particular, that of Mary Magdalene. Through an intermediate world, in a mediation between the divine and the human, in an imaginary place and time Mary Magdalene sees, and is the first to see what no one else can see. He can listen and he can reveal, he cannot touch but only he will be able to love even more the one he has already loved and loves.


“The language of the sacred scriptures is that of images and symbols that belong to dreams, rather than to the concepts of the sciences. The appearance that manifests itself to Myriam of Magdala – inwardly and outwardly – is Spirit and Body, it is what makes Myriam an ánthropos, a complete human being_”

(The Gospel of Mary, Mary Magdalene, Jean-Yves Leloup, Servitium editrice, 2011).


Think of how the fortunes of the current world could change if “complete human beings” through the collective imagination, the collective unconscious that makes the ego equal to the us, the exact same original gesture, could make real an existence always dreamed of, another human being even more complete within a Nature that has always been complete.

The poetry that writes of good and evil, of the Angel that rises and the Angel that falls, of the jealous Angel of Lermontov that drives out the Angel of Heaven “_and in the celestial ether /slow /sunk.”, art in every form as complex as the human being is complex, and in particular the theater that emanates thought and action through a mortal body like that of Christ and Magdalene, these refractions of form and matter and knowledge regenerate the state of things and the world, warn and formulate prophecies about the destinies of everyone, like sentinels who scan the horizon for new apocalypses, for new images to imagine and make real.


There is a regeneration and an image of regeneration.

One must truly be reborn by means of the image.


What is resurrection?

The image must arise by means of the image..

Vang. Phil 67,10




IN PERFECT DISORDER

Maria Federica Maestri


Suspended horizontally in an interior marked by workers' work at the time of the first industrial machinery, the columns exfiltrated from the façade of the Venetian Church of Maddalena, Jesus' favorite wise disciple, establish an exorbitant, excess space, deviating from the vertical rule useful to the obedient faithful, kneeling and dreamless.


They oppose, thus lying down and disarmed, the low → high order, a harsh norm that hierarchizes the ascent and descent into the plastic-moral pyramid of bodies and volumes.


Thus unnecessarily aligned, they allow us to escape the spiritual vertigo of the double long neck - of the Madonna and the column behind her - illumination of Parmigianino and the sublime horror of the double stub - fleshy of Christ and marble blackened by blood - in Caravaggio's Scourge.

There is no glory in the reality of the Man who suffers on the cross, but only tremendous, unbearable pain, so we love the Savior told in the (Gnostic) Apocalypse of Peter who smiles at us from the tree on which he is hanging and who, in the inevitable suffering of torture, is replaced by a ‘pre-body’ in his likeness.


Transported by these turbulences of the imagination, converted to the sofa of dove-gooder thoughts and bodiless kisses, the four columns of neoclassical memory float in the marshy space of active life like little boats or paper airplanes that children suspend with their hands and push into the void with the impertinent breath of innocence.

For the physical reason of the fake-true, these four heavy-made sisters also take flight and stand out in the air, giving life to a space-time of pure intuition, a field of pure sensation in which to embrace the shadow and laugh at the darkness.


What is Matter?

Will it last forever?

Everything that was born

everything that has been created

all elements

nature is intertwined

hug each other

everything that was composed

it will be decomposed

and everything will return to the Root.


Matter will return to Root

who has ears to hear

intend

understand!


What is the sin of the world?

There is no sin

it is you who give life to sin

when you act and betray

this is the sin!

This is why Good arrived

inside your nature

to get her back to the Root

that's why you are sick

why do you die

why are you far_


He will have to figure out who he can understand

you understand

understand!


Media

Credits

Creation Maria Federica Maestri ~ Francesco Pititto

Dramaturgy ~ Imagoturgy Francesco Pititto

Composition ~ Installation ~ costumes Maria Federica Maestri

Music Andrea Azzali

Cast Tiziana Cappella ~ CL Grugher ~ Marcello Sambati ~ Sandra Soncini ~ Carlotta Spaggiari

Curating Elena Sorbi

Organization Ilaria Stocchi

Press Office ~ Comunication Elisa Barbieri

Promotion ~ Graphic design Alessandro Conti

Lights design Alice Scartapacchio

Production assistant Giulia Mangini

Technical care Lucia Manghi ~ Paolo Romanini

Photo Elisa Morabito

Production Lenz Fondazione ~ Natura Dèi Teatri

Press

Sipario


Nicola Arrigoni

«Feeling like you are living is perhaps the meaning of theatre» conversation with Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto»


There are artists who give precious gifts, who demonstrate a generosity in giving themselves that is unique because they are moved by knowledge, like Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto who in Parma carry forward with determination their artistic journey which has story and life in Lenz Teatro. And it seems we can say that the urgency and persistence of being and saying is discernible in the quotation from the First Apocalypse of James when it reads: But I will call upon timeless knowledge, that is, Sophia (...) she is female from a female’. And from here we like to start from being female, from being fertile, from giving without asking anything else behind, this is what Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto gave to the magazine Sipario in agreeing not only to answer the questions of the theater reporter, but I make those questions a precious and fruitful opportunity of their work.

ER Cultura


Ancient treasures on stage. Lenz's Gnostic Apocalypses. They talk about it in the video service Maestri e Sambati


There is a need to be narrated in a different way, to be enlightened by a divergent revelation about the Apocalypse, at the basis of Lenz's new work, the last chapter of a project that investigated the literatures of the Sacred for four years. The show, entitled Gnostic Apocalypses, will be on stage for the first time in Parma from 23 to 31 October (performed on 23-24-25-26-29-30-31) as part of the XXVIII edition of the Natura Dèi Teatri Festival, curated by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, and sees the return to Lenz of the poet, actor and director Marcello Sambati, secluded and luminous figure of Italian theatre, on stage with Sandra Soncini, CL Grugher, Carlotta Spaggiari and Tiziana Cappella. We met Maestri and Sambati At the rehearsals, here's what they told us.

TIPO Magazine


Alberto Zanetti

“Apocalissi Gnostiche”: la rivelazione è a teatro


Maria Federica Maestri e Francesco Pititto ci parlano della nuova creazione di Lenz che debutta a Parma dal 23 al 31 ottobre per la 28° edizione del festival Natura Dèi Teatri.