In the auto sacramental the human, who has been defined “a synthesis of the theological history of humanity” (Valbuena Prat), fallen for original sin, is restored to his sovereign rank by means of Redemption; the “dream of life” is here the dream of sin, and theology confirms, at a much higher level, philosophy”.
The Power, Wisdom, Love, Shadow, Light, Prince of Darkness, Man, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Understanding, Arbitration and Music: these are the people of self sacramental.
The Imminent Past (Il Passato Imminente) is a four-year project of site-specific performative, choreographic, visual and sound installations created in the monumental spaces of the Pilotta Complex in Parma conceived and directed by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto in collaboration with the musician Claudio Rocchetti.
The project consists of the contemporary installation of the works of Pedro Calderón de La Barca: the autos sacramentales The Great Theatre of the World (Il Grande Teatro del Mondo, 2018) and La vida es sueño (2019) modern translation of religious festivals of the seventeenth century Spanish and in 2020 three solos inspired by the works of the Spanish author. To culminate in 2021 with Life is a Dream (La Vita è Sogno), a pivotal work of Western theatre staged in the historical-rural landscape of the Valserena Abbey
The first part of the three-year project was carried out between the large rooms of the Neoclassical Gallery and in the Farnese Theatre; over twenty artists, including performers from the Lenz ensemble and harpsichordists from the Arrigo Boito Conservatory in Parma, gave substance to the scenic rewriting of the visions of the Great Theater of the World.
The second chapter was set up in the new north wing of the National Gallery, where the precious baroque collection is preserved. An impressive installation of hospital beds dialogued with the functional structures designed in the seventies by the architect Canali and the sacred depictions of Lanfranco, Schedoni, Spada, Ribera, Murillo, van Dyck.
The third chapter of the Imminent Past consists of three solos inspired by Calderón's works: Life is a Dream and The Constant Prince. Set in the magnificent industrial-origin spaces of Lenz Teatro they are played by the ensemble's historical actresses.
The fourth part of the project was carried out within the historical-rural landscape of the Abbey of Valserena, or Abbey of San Martino dei Bocci, commonly known as the Certosa di Paradigna, a former Cistercian abbey with Gothic and Baroque forms located in Paradigna, a hamlet on the northern outskirts of Parma. Founded in 1298 and deconsecrated in 1810, it has been home to the CSAC – Communication Study Center and Archive of the University of Parma since 2007
The installation of La Vida es Sueño consists of fourteen metal hospital beds, reclining, placed side by side along the Gallery, in clear mirroring with the sculptural groups and large late seventeenth-century canvases depicting Lamentations, Depositions and Annunciations and in close material dialogue with the imposing sky-trestle in innocent tubes created by the architect Guido Canali in the seventies, at the time of the renovation of the Pilotta in the name of a museum space understood as «a system that must necessarily exhibit its mechanisms».
Wedged between dream and awakening, the sanitary cot – stripped of mattresses and sheets – evokes not only the suspended time of agony, the fissure between life and death, but also the bed of mental hospital restraint, a residual place where the only possible space of freedom is in dream life.
On the three empty exhibition walls that run along the thirty-five meters of the North Gallery are imprinted the imagoturgies in which the figure of Job, from the painting by Antonio de Pereda present in an adjacent room, overlaps with those of some auto sacramental performers. They are figures who, transfiguring themselves into each other, can compose a new painting, between reality and dream, which includes entrances and exits between the two doors of life. A painting among the paintings which, however, will be short-lived, only the temporary time of a representation.
Our Man, for self-sacramental, will have the features of an adolescent in the same posture as the painting: holding the shard, his hand resting on his heart and his gaze turned upwards, towards God. The difference between the fixity of the picture in the penitent figure of Job and the movement of the Man/Child, in the young body of those who look towards the future, will act as a distinction between the freedom granted whether or not to betray the Faith and the freedom to be conquered as life progresses. What is the boundary between the free will of one and the other?
Creation Maria Federica Maestri, Francesco Pititto
Text, imagoturgy Francesco Pititto
Direction, installation, costumes Maria Federica Maestri
Music Claudio Rocchetti, Johann Sebastian Bach
Performer Sandra Soncini, Franck Berzieri, Paolo Maccini (Ensemble Lenz Fondazione); Matteo Castellazzi, Lorenzo Davini, Martina Gismondi, Agata Pelosi, Margherita Picchi, Giada Vaccaro (Associazione Ars Canto) e Giuseppina Cattani, Maria Giardino, Elena Nunziata, Mirella Pongolini, Cesare Quintavalla, Valeria Spocci
Singers Debora Tresanini (soprano), Elena Maria Giovanna Pinna (soprano), Eva Maria Ruggieri (contralto), Davide Zaccherini (tenore)
Curating Elena Sorbi
Organization Ilaria Stocchi,
Production assistant Loredana Scianna
Press office, communication Michele Pascarella
Technical care Alice Scartapacchio
Production Lenz Fondazione
Site-specific inside Complesso Monumentale della Pilotta for Parma Capitale Italiana della Cultura 2020+21 made with the patronage and contribution of Comune di Parma
Gianni Manzella
Bodies harnessed inside costumes that seem not by chance to be instruments of restraint – bodies of elderly singing actors, of actors made sensitive by having gone through psychic disability, emphasized by the comparison with youth
Giuseppe Distefano
Theatre. Lenz's visions inspired by Calderon de la Barca
Some sequences are of poignant emotional strength. Like that of the Man and his double Child touching each other and touching their faces, their hands, looking at each other [...] Finally a small tricycle advances, carried by a woman. The Child climbs on it. Walking backwards through the long room, he returns to the starting point, stopping in front of the pile of rags, an ashen and shapeless mass from which he had emerged.
Valeria Ottolenghi
The allegorical aspects are absorbed by the truth of the bodies: a moving and exciting spectacle. Maestri and Pititto reread Calderón de la Barca's best-known text between painful monologues and aesthetic vortices.
Massimo Marino
A digging on the text as a reinvention of ancient words and memories, metabolized in dreamlike scenarios that speak to the soul crevasses of the present.
Emanuela Zanon
The spectator is free to move around the exhibition rooms left in dim light and to discover the characters of the drama initially crouched and motionless in their niches of darkness. Then the music: insinuating, fragmented, persuasive, dissonant and painful.
Petra Chiodi
In La Vida es Sueño – auto sacramental (2019) – second chapter of the three-year site-specific project Il Passato Imminente – the exchange between seventeenth-century paintings and images of reality is a dazzling fact.
Enrico Pastore
Everything flows inexorably under the Caravaggio lights that carve the figures, giving them a strange and unnatural consistency. There remain those hospital beds that welcome old and young people united by a common infirmity linked to human action/suffering.
Simona M. Frigerio
The installation, therefore, is a strong point of this self sacramental which, through allegorical images, leads the protagonist, the everyman and the spectator through ever deeper and more painful states of knowledge.
Luciano Uggé
A round of applause for the crisp and flawless installation consisting of hospital beds that take on different functions throughout the story.
Ignacio Garcia
Director of the Almagro Festival (Spain)
Thanks to Lenz Foundation for dreaming of such a poetic show and a way of working without barriers. Thank you for placing us in front of the abyss again.
Salvatore Tedesco
The conduct of this work, his way of shaping the spaces of the Pilotta, of coordinating interpreters who are so different from each other and so concretely –so creatively – present, seemed truly extremely interesting to me.
Enrico Piergiacomi
What interests the Lenz Foundation is to narrate the birth, growth and death of Man, asking the assembled spectators some fundamental questions, much bigger than themselves.
Matteo Brighenti
The game with infinity, all for all by Francesco Pititto and Maria Federica Maestri, is a stage that inhabits the gift of making poetry out of gravity.
Giulio Sonno
Here it matters little that the so-called «sensitive actor» knows how to re-quote those verses, loses them or reinvents them, because at that moment he is opening a glimpse of vision that has little to do with the show intended as a test and show of talent. Here we really pretend.