Hamlet, based on William Shakespeare's masterpiece, directed by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, stars former long-term mental health patients from the Colorno asylum, now residents of a therapeutic-rehabilitation community, and a core group of sensitive actors who have been protagonists of Lenz's most significant works for years.
Hamlet represents the culmination of a long and profound laboratory and artistic experience that has placed the psychic sensitivity of the contemporary actor at the center of Lenz Fondazione's poetics and aesthetics.
After investigating Faust's demons, Sigismund's disabuse in Life Is a Dream, and the anxieties of Büchner's characters –Woyzeck, Lenz, Leonce and Lena, The Death of Danton - the long search for Hamlet takes shape in the full truth of fiction.
The theatrical language of Lenz Rifrazioni (now Fondazione) is based on an extreme and radical fidelity to the word of the text. In the search for the heroic state of the actor, theatre takes shape in the oscillation between weakness and strength, vulnerability and power of the speaking body. The extreme state of feeling, the passion that moves and pushes towards death, the tragic killing of the hero, the condition of dreams and reality, the mystery of the human condition, are generated by the act of speaking, the full body of the voice. The mythical boundary of Shakespeare's works is marked by two fundamental lines: the original language and the rebirth of the word in the actor's body. The foreign but not foreign sound of the English language of the late sixteenth century, passing through the actor's exiled body, can once again sing the line of nostalgia in the truth of the scene. A polyphonic bridge between ancient and modern, between general and particular, between language and dialect, Shakespeare's Hamlet powerfully echoes the art of theatre in contemporary times and in the renewal of language. Poetry, dramaturgy, direction, the work of the actor –between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – once again to seek together the conditions of birth, revelation, existence and non-existence, the enigma and impossibility of representation.
Hamlet, based on William Shakespeare's masterpiece, directed by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, stars former long-term mental patients from the Colorno asylum, now residents of a therapeutic-rehabilitation community, and a core of sensitive actors who have been protagonists of Lenz's most significant works for years. Since 2000, the group has been experimenting with its expressive skills in a permanent laboratory conducted in collaboration with the Integrated Mental Health and Pathological Addictions Department of the Local Health Authority of Parma.
Hamlet represents the summa of a long and profound laboratory and artistic experience that has placed the psychic sensitivity of the contemporary actor at the centre of Lenz Rifrazioni's poetics and aesthetics. Liliana Bertè, Franck Berzieri, Guglielmo Gazzelli, Paolo Maccini, Luigi Moia, Lino Pontremoli, Delfina Rivieri, Vincenzo Salemi, Mauro Zunino together with Elena Varoli and Barbara Voghera, already an extraordinary interpreter of Hamlet in the 1999 production, create with surprising power a great tragic fresco of human existence.
After investigating Faust's demons, Sigismund's disenchantments in Life Is a Dream, and the broken lives of the characters in Büchner's tetralogy (Woyzeck, Lenz, Leonce and Lena, The Death of Danton), the search for Hamlet takes shape in the full truth of fiction. The structural asymmetry of the text, its perfect dramaturgical disequilibrium, adheres profoundly to the psychic asymmetry of the actors who embody it. By grafting the conceptual and thematic nodes of the Hamlet into their own intimate landscape, the interpreters intensely engaged, in a long two-year laboratory work, with the words of the drama until they produced a true emotional, personal and unique rewrite.
In Lenz's creation, two monumental levels are stratified: the first is the textual one, the Hamlet is the founding masterpiece of modern Western theatre and literature, the second is the human one in the complexity and enormity of its impulses: Hamlet's “pathology”, the representation of his madness, in fact coincide with the human experience of the interpreters, life and text are in total adhesion and in an absolute poetic interpenetration.
The research project on Hamlet was structured into three preparatory studies – H=177 Lb, H 1|2|3, H 4|5|6 – and in three macro-stage productions: after preliminary dramatic elaborations, the scenic writing of the work was completely retranslated into fourteen sequences that were reconfigured and dramaturgically recomposed in the three different mise-en-espaces. Hamlet has in fact been installed in three important historical-monumental complexes in the province of Parma: in 2010 in the late sixteenth-century Rocca dei Rossi di San Secondo, in 2011 on the main floor of the sumptuous Royal Palace of Colorno and finally in 2012 in the Pilotta Complex of Parma, a prestigious cultural epicenter of the area which includes the seventeenth-century Farnese Theatre. In 2012, Hamlet of Lenz Rifrazioni also joined the video&performance archive Global Shakespeares, an online platform coordinated by Prof. Alexander Huang of George Washington University, which brings together contributions, contributions, and works by the world's leading Shakespeare scholars.
H = 277 LB (Progetto Hamlet) da Hamlet di William Shakespeare.
Rating: Maria Federica Maestri, Francesco Pititto.
View: Francesco Pititto.
Transducer: Vincenzo Salemi.
Sound acquisition system: Andrea Azzali.
Bologna, Teatro San Martino, 17 march 2009.
H=277 lb (HAMLET=277 POUNDS) is the first visual and performative sequence of a four-year artistic project (2009–2012), in which the dramaturgy presents itself as a corpus of analytical and material-aesthetic evaluations starting from William Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Force transducers measure static and dynamic loads, in traction and compression – virtually without deflection.
Hamlet is intoxicated by the virtual ghost that is reflected, paternal and semblance, in the neuromuscular whirlwind. The brain becomes loaded with love and filial correspondences producing constrained energy. The condition of equality, but opposite in perception, triggers a movement of penetration into the real world. The neurotransmitter turns on the engines of chemistry. Man moves. At work, body! The brain is on! The transducer/player conducts the energy load of punishment, contactless paternal return, and the rekindling of a newly reopened emotional circuit.
“Mark me. My hour is already here, to the flame that torments me I must make myself. Something's stinking in Denmark.” The stench of burning comes straight to the sensors that stimulate the siren of wailing, the force drains between the holes/pores of the flesh and bitter tears. Prayer resonates and resumes the path of matter that leads from one point to another. The small relay unleashes the power and load of life, stubborn and tense. It slams against the massive, deadly body of the meter that never bends, albeit swallowing fate. Vincenzo Salemi unloads the lightning and measures its weight, the compression created in the ether feels its force and closes the circuit between earth and sky.
HAMLET 1|2|3 (Hamlet Project) from Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
Rating: Maria Federica Maestri, Francesco Pititto.
View: Francesco Pititto.
Transducers: Valentina Barbarini, Guglielmo Gazzelli, Paolo Maccini, Vincenzo Salemi, Elena Sorbi, Elena Varoli, Barbara Voghera.
Sound acquisition system: Andrea Azzali.
Parma, Lenz Teatro, Phoenix 09, 20 may 2009.
H 1|2|3 is the study on the first three visual and performative sequences of a four-year artistic project (2009–2012), in which dramaturgy presents itself as a corpus of analytical and material-aesthetic evaluations starting from William Shakespeare's Hamlet.
In H 1|2|3 the story of Prince Hamlet is reread and ‘evaluated’ through a visual, material and physical reflection investigation on the bodies of the interpreters which penetrates Shakespearean language to define a new concrete dramaturgical horizon, constituted starting from the psychic and material existences of the actors: language circumscribes new words that make alive the suffering and tragedy of hamlet and of existence itself, as well as death that seems to circumscribe all human action. The ghost of the King, Hamlet's father, forced to move slowly and curse his own tragic fate with cruel words, is inscribed within the tired but visionary body of the interpreter who seems to slowly slide outside the Shakespearean character, founding an autonomous poetic space engraved in its materiality which in the horror of death sculpts a new scenic portrait.
In his encounter with his father's ghost, Prince Hamlet, adorned with a metal hat and a studded collar as if embedded in the interpreter's body, fills his mother's incestuous drama and his uncle's murderous act with obsessive words, seeking the security of revenge in the violent vision of those images. Ophelia, wounded by madness in her beauty, forced to wear an orthopedic collar, returns to Hamlet all the words and things that had bound them in love, material signs of a farewell song that focuses on a final gesture wounded by tragedy and suffering. Moving on stage as mechanical elements Hamlet and Ophelia retain in their memory all the pain of separation from themselves and their love.
HAMLET 4|5|6 BLACK WIDOWS (Hamlet Project) from Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
Rating: Maria Federica Maestri, Francesco Pititto.
View: Francesco Pititto.
Transducers: Liliana Bertè, Guglielmo Gazzelli, Paolo Maccini, Delfina Rivieri, Barbara Voghera.
Sound acquisition system: Andrea Azzali.
Collecchio, Teatro alla Corte, Festival Natura Dèi Teatri, 22 ottobre 2009.
H 4|5|6 Black Widows, is the third preparatory study of a four-year artistic project (2009–2012), in which dramaturgy presents itself as a corpus of analytical and material-aesthetic evaluations starting from William Shakespeare's Hamlet. It is a triptych dedicated to the “Black Queens” of Hamlet, Gertrude and Ophelia, protagonists of a similar fate of death. In the slow and evocative intercession of Shakespeare's words, which fit into the living language of the actors' material existences, in complete expressive autonomy, one glimpses the tragedy of history and existence. Queen Gertrude, in search of her first husband Hamlet, now only the memory of a ghost who cannot react to her gestures and questions, allows herself to be seduced by the extreme proposal of Claudius, Hamlet's brother, arousing the contempt and horror of Prince Hamlet, her son, determined to resolute violence against his uncle to avenge the murderous act against his father and honor his memory. The ‘never’ Queen Ophelia, in her heartbreaking plea to Hamlet not to abandon her, prepares, with black, screaming and dramatic sequences, the final farewell in the suicidal waters that welcome her drowned body. Only in the atonement of Gertrude, who drinks the poisoned chalice prepared by Hamlet, does the drama of guilt and betrayal appear.
