Persinsala.it
Daniele Rizzo
Hyperion/Diotima – Natura Dèi Teatri 2014. L’arte, utile passione
From Friedrich Hölderlin's Hyperion, the character from the famous Symposium is the protagonist of the new creation created by Lenz Rifrazioni and the Polish musician Paul Wirkus. An extraordinary manifestation of Platonic thought (she was the one who introduced Socrates to true ideal love) and the female pole of epistolary exchange with her beloved Hyperion in Hölderlin's novel, Diotima is «one of the most complex figures in Hölderlin's mythography». Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto then returned to investigate the «German poet, philosopher, romantic playwright» after «the staging of the three drafts of The Death of Empedocles, Oedipus the Tyrant, Antigone, Hölderlin-Foscolo, The Age of Querci» between 1991 and 1994. A renewed interest that, not surprisingly, occurs within the three-year project of the Natura Dèi Teatri Festival inspired by «philosophical suggestions taken from the work of Gilles Deleuze», because the theme of difference, of the ideological conception of identity and repetition, of the attempt at revolt against a dialectical destiny with homologating and lacerating outcomes, is the ideal conceptual framework to pose the fundamental question of «in-depth investigation of the languages of contemporary creation». Paul Wirkus' live electronic sounds contribute to giving full density to the setting of a splendidly simple staging with exemplary visual impact for how he manages to convey in the (scenographic) sign the perfect coincidence of meaning and signifier, thus supporting the full power of Nietzsche's statement «there are no facts, only interpretations» and the radicality of an intuition that recognized (inter)subjective interpretation's ability to shape consciences and discipline bodies. An intuition reiterated almost explicitly on stage («Forget time, and don't count the days of life. What are the hundred years in front of the moment when two of us feel and only then touch») and which still today is relevant (therefore historically inaccurate), even if debased in the idea that –to paraphrase that quote – only opinions exist and not arguments. The round, white, and tense cloth that Valentina Barbarini passes through in concentration, while reciting fragments retranslated from the Hyperion, is the sublimated representation of the fullness of the Parmenidean being in all its (empirical) paradoxicality. Indivisible and perfect, immobile and identical (for reason), it appears (in the senses) to be acted upon by an incongruity irreconcilable by the presence of that human in progress which, in fact, we will see physically and not projected. Therefore concrete, outside and not inside (except as a shadow), because within it only the images of a Nature can flow from which man – unbearable «sour grapes … among the sweet grapes» – is banished. Maieutics and erotica, the creative power of art and nature in conflict with a man who, proclaiming himself sapiens, has forgotten his own animality, in Lenz's Diotima / Hyperion we see dramaturgical research converging with investigation in favor of a renewed visual restitution of primordial existential dilemmas: the yearning for infinity that structurally torments the human being and his inevitable shipwreck («But man is god as soon as man! And if he's a god, then he's handsome! [..] But my arms were increasingly tired and anguish dragged me down, inexorable»); the longing for a pantheistic harmony («there was me, yours. A flower among flowers») and the perception of historical defeat in modernity («Defending ourselves from the flies will be our future occupation. Gnawing on things in the world, like children. Getting old among the old is the worst thing. They start from the heart and return to the heart, the veins»). Diotima is then the intimately contradictory symbol of the risk of disengagement and loneliness («What do I care about the shipwreck of the world! I know nothing but my blessed island»). A risk that, seen within this specific artistic context «an industrial building on the historic outskirts of Parma» where culture, in addition to resisting, continues to endure, seems at all demeaning, but rather dispensing strength and passion. Exactly like that song of hope and beauty that was Diotima for Hyperion. A show of disarming coherence.
