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.
