After the first four episodes of Il Furioso (1) – #1 La Fuga and #2 L'Isola of Alcina set in the Guatelli Museum and #3 L'Uomo and #4 Il Palazzo in the former Rasori Pavilion of the Parma Hospital – Orlando's endless search for amorous sense and jealousy, between paintings and shots in a labyrinthine chessboard, between a museum of Peasant Memory and a department of Illness and Healing, continues and concludes with the last four chapters Il Furioso (2) – #5 L’Illusione, #6 La Follia, #7 La Morte, #8 La Luna.
The new installation takes place in a palace that includes all four themes: the imposing Temple of Cremation in Valera (Parma), with interiors and exteriors for the grandest madness, the most important step, a new Atlas palace of the illusion proclaimed and then revealed, that is, real life, where paladins and women on the run do not recognize each other except in their mutual passing, in the incessant “searching without ever finding“, with eyes on the Moon looking at each other on Earth wriggling in vain.
Welcomed by the monumental colonnade of the façade, the audience, together with the actors, passes through the solemn and austere farewell room, arriving through the ‘inevitable’ passage of the crematorium's engine room to the lunar field of the common cinerary urn where Orlando's journey will end.
The new dramatic research dedicated to Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso is underway, a two-year project structured into eight scenic episodes – four of which were presented in 2015 and four in 2016. Addressing Ariosto's great chivalric poem, a disruptive work that challenges the stylistic standards and literary canons of the time by oscillating between phantasmagoria, dream states, narrative vortices and contemporary sensibility, Lenz continues –after the creations inspired by Manzoni and D'Annunzio – his own performative investigation into the poetic power of the Italian language. The protagonists of the journey into the Furious will be the sensitive actors –with mental and intellectual disabilities– and the historical actors of Lenz, in an inexhaustible and inexhaustible dialogue for the renewal of the contemporary theatrical language.
“Modern neuroscience holds that serotonin, oxytocin, and dopamine, the neurotransmitters released by the brain, are able to decode feelings. They show us, for example, that falling in love also contains obsessive-compulsive disorder biochemically: in lovers and obsessives, serotonin levels are similarly reduced. The neural roots of jealousy, on the other hand, are found in the area of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is located roughly just above the forehead. In this region we process emotions and reflect on ourselves and others. Here we treat the thoughts and feelings of the one or woman we love and predict scenarios about his or her possible loss, such as an irreparable catastrophe”.
Five hundred years after Orlando's Madness, neuroscience provides us with scientific data on falling in love and jealousy, again in dialogue with art, particularly theatre: the compulsion of jealousy is called “Othello syndrome” by Shakespeare. It is undeniable that love and jealousy are the fundamental dramatic nuclei of Ariosto's poem, war is only a pretext and there is no one around Paris anymore. They are all in the middle of the woods or on the moon, in different places of the psyche chasing each other and waging war, until a magical building, whose internal passages resemble a brain, attracts them, fascinated, all inside. And that's where the synapse begins to dance.
The actors armed with everyday life, armored yet sensitive to the past and present, already imprinted in their bodies and minds by chivalric heroes, their own magicians and sorceresses, girls fleeing directionlessly and relentlessly, activate transmitters of invention and essential gesture, and the great work becomes a timeless fresco.
Epicus • Amor • Inops mentis
Lenz's research into the archetypes of the Italian language continues, after Manzoni a backward turn towards Ludovico Ariosto and his Furioso, among the major poems of the Renaissance. The book of heroism and madness, scattered in rhizome throughout the work, Orlando's excessive and paradoxical madness, exaggerated, which explodes into the invicible knight pure and perfect, sane and principled. But madness is the poetic-linguistic-aesthetic structure of the work itself, lost like reason within “the container that contained its sense, found by Astolfo on the Moon and pushed back into the body of its rightful owner” as Italo Calvino writes in the presentation of his Furioso. The loss of oneself, of things, of reality, of parallel stories, of the plot, of magic, of desire, of the spatial explosion of narrative contexts, the blindest and most sudden bestiality that draws poetic frameworks absolutely new to chivalric stereotypes: this is the nervous system of Orlando Furioso. A monumental octave imagoturgy that outlines an epochal transition to a different, more overlapping, more complicated world. A century later Cervantes, with his furious Don Quixote, would give the final blow to chivalric literature, but, again quoting Calvin, “among the few books that survive, when the curate and the barber set fire to the library that has driven the hidalgo of La Mancha to madness, there is the Furious …” The work will be structured into eight performative and visual episodes installed and directed by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto – four in 2015 and four in 2016. Interpreters, together with Lenz's core of historical actors, the “sensitive”, psychically and intellectually disabled actors, who, having fully matured a research path unique in Europe in terms of intensity and expressive results, impose, faithful to Artaud's word, an irrational and ‘furious’ vision of contemporary theatre.
Dramaturgy, imagoturgy, film scenes Francesco Pititto
Installation of Plastic Elements directed by Maria Federica Maestri
Music Andrea Azzali
Performers Walter Bastiani, Franck Berzieri, Marco Cavellini, Massimiliano Cavezzi, Carlo Destro, Paolo Maccini, Delfina Rivieri, Carlotta Spaggiari, Barbara Voghera
Technical Direction Alice Scartapacchio
Technical team Lucia Manghi, Stefano Glielmi, Yannick De Sousa Mendes, Marco Cavellini
Assistant Director Roberto Riseri
Curating Elena Sorbi
Organization Ilaria Stocchi
Communication Valeria Borelli
Press Office Michele Pascarella
Production Lenz Fondazione
Project carried out with the support of DAISM-DP Integrated Mental Health Care Department Pathological Addictions AUSL of Parma
In collaboration with So.Crem Cremation Society, Ser-Cim Cemetery Services
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Alessandro Trentadue
Lenz, Nd't #21 arrives in Parma: a living museum in Punto Cieco
The Guatelli Museum, the Rasori pavilion of the Hospital, where we performed the first episodes of The Furious, and now the Temple of Valera –but we could also say Lenz Teatro – are not only material, historical and architectural places but are, above all, places of humanity, of human life and thought.
Mariacristina Maggi
Furioso, Lenz makes silence speak
But also reflections on the most important theme of the human question, death: and then more amazement, anguish, but also a strange and sweet familiarity with what we would never want to experience and a beauty that is difficult to define.
Corrado Beldì
Lenz Fondazione: Il Furioso (2)
More cryptic than ever, this show by Lenz must be seen for several reasons: the location, truly incomparable and perfect for this dramaturgy, the acting so raw and anti-theatrical that it enhances the text, the staging with projections and lights that make the Temple of Cremation even more ghostly.
Alessandro Trentadue
Parma, in the crematorium theater: contemporary research or provocation?
The reactions of the people who participate are different. Emotion, amazement, shock. The attempt at a final contact, with the hand, on the containers of unknown bodies. A limit on which to open a reflection: on how far the theatre of research can –or should – go to arouse an emotion, a reaction.
Sergio Lo Gatto
Lenz, between the Furious and Macbeth. Sensitive viewers
Pititto's dramaturgy is swallowed up by his imagoturgy, a magniloquent yet trembling visual fabric, made up of silent but significant video sequences, almost a super-plot that watches over the evolution of characters and moods –once again– not of actors and characters, but of the spectators.
Matteo Brighenti
Searching Without Ever Finding: Lenz Fondazione and the New Furioso
No scandal or vilification in making it a stage for the first time, because death is in itself a theatre, like life. The Furious (2) has been fulfilled with pain and sweetness and we remain as if uncertain and suspended: beauty then serves to deceive, love does not give happiness. Real is the darkness that swallows us and that only the little lights of the tombs illuminate. Life is but a walking shadow.