Macbeth

Laura Pasotti

Macbeth, Rems guests stage Shakespeare's tragedy

“For over 15 years we have been carrying out artistic activities with long-term mental patients, in situations degraded by the habit of thinking and reflection – explains Maria Federica Maestri – Last year the Local Health Authority offered us the opportunity to work with former residents of judicial psychiatric hospitals. From this solicitation, we tried to trigger a dramaturgical motivation”. Thus was born the work on Macbeth: “Shakespeare's anniversary, which we had already thought of celebrating with a re-edition of the tragedy, staged in 2000, is the valve of necessity that triggers the artistic process – continues Maestri – . And then there is the embarrassing coincidence of the theme, of the compromised psychological balance, of the conflictual emotional condition that creates a trauma in reality”

Saul Stocchi

Interview with Maria Federica Maestri on Macbeth by Lenz Foundation

Guests are extremely willing to compete with a complex text, in a translation (Pititto's one) that makes no concessions, does not trivialize, and certainly does not facilitate entry through narrative shortcuts.

Alessandro Trentadue

Macbeth from Lenz in Parma: A New Look at Our Madness

A new reversal of perspective. A look of social relativity that involves everyone. All of us modern and modest “crazy”. After starting the new Cura Ludovico for Lenz Foundation it is time for a new chapter of research together with sensitive actors.

Mariacristina Maggi

The Macbeth of the Turning Point

This project defines a new theatrical and anthropological map in which madness and normality no longer exist, but rather a cloud, an opaque zone that belongs to everyone, into which so many sensibilities converge and which can have art and theater as a point of transformation and encounter; that theater capable of recovering the value of the subject: even of those isolated for too long. We enter this gap and try to build a bridge: a thin thread that relates to an unknown world and a different sensibility.

Ranata Savo

#Dialoghi. Apettando il Macbeth di Lenz: esperienza estetica e gestione sociale della follia

La scelta del dispositivo drammatico è fondamentale per individuare la funzione estetica dell’atto artistico: le limitazioni determinate dalle restrizioni della libertà personale poste dal sistema giudiziario (la concessione dei permessi è di pertinenza dei giudici) rendono de facto debole la presenza dell’attore inteso in senso tradizionale; ma è proprio questa condizione di realtà presagita, narrata, immaginata il dispositivo scenico che impianta il nostro Macbeth.

Valeria Borelli

Natura Dèi Teatri. The blind spot of languages

The reunification between radical aesthetic experience and living community can restore the theatre to the original ethical function of tragedy. This research still seems necessary to us today for a constant rewriting of our theatrical language, understood as the physics of the imagination, the chemistry of social bodies, differentiated and exalted in the subjectivity of their aesthetic action.

Giulio Sonno

The Weight of Awareness: Lenz Foundation's Macbeth Debuts at Natura dèi Teatri

So here is the theme par excellence (artistic and human): awareness. Awareness of what happens to us, of what we do in response, of what follows from it. We are all partially blind, that is, we can all rediscover ourselves as masters in the middle of our selves, guests of a body that conditions us.

Diego Monferdini

The premiere of Lenz's Macbeth with former inmates of the Judicial Psychiatric Hospitals

The scene, however, minimalist and dreamlike, an architecture of light and shadow generated by video installations, is entirely for Lenz's historic actress, Sandra Soncini. Austere, inexorable, inconsolable. In other words terrible yes, but so vulnerable. The idea that suggests the staging is a magma that resembles an embryonic stage, like a placenta in Lady Macbeth's brain. We are literally inside his head and his ghosts, imprisoned between the railings of the REMS. The value of the musical score, as in all the works of the Lenz theatre, is truly central: Azzali, through electronic impulses with a robust tragic aftertaste, underlines the àphonic grammar of hearts locked up in prison for decades without even the consolation (or torture) of guilt.

Alan Mauro Vai

Natura Dèi Teatri: Macbeth e Simone Weil

Played on shadows, on light, as on silences and dark sounds, Lenz's Macbeth addresses the deepest nature of man, leaving glimpses of delirium and the tragedy of necessary action as a way of no return, between what is and what seems.

Matteo Brighenti

Macbeth and Hamlet 2016, the Invention of the Human by Lenz Fondazione, Francesco Dendi and Alessio Martinoli

They are the faces of hallucinating, blurry, burned men: a flow of eyelashes, hair, beard, mouth, teeth, broken, divided by the joints that hold the set together, stitches, torn mendos like Alberto Burri's sacks. When that cave, that monolith of the murderous mind opens, it reveals Sandra Soncini, Lady Macbeth dressed in black in a swivel chair. Alienated darkness with a pulsating heart.

Luciano Uggè e Simona M. Frigerio

Macbeth. Guilt without responsibility

The Book of Life (an installation by the director herself, Maria Federica Maestri) opens to tell, through flashes and suggestions, passages from Shakespeare's tragedy woven with the new language that arises from the comparison with those who have directly experienced textual matter in their existence. Broken pieces of a puzzle that reconstructs the story of betrayal, murder, a slow slide into madness with no chance of salvation – or, for those who believe it, redemption.

A strong choice was to create a diaphragm between the performer, present on stage, and the REMS guests, only on video. This choice, partly due to security regulations, poetically reinforces these figures as presences/absences, archetypal imagos of guilt in the filmic imagination, who become carnal matter within the structure/prison (real and metaphorical), although they cannot and should not participate in the scene so as not to transform themselves into a story of themselves.

Tommaso Chimenti

Disability and Madness on Stage with Babilonia Teatri and Lenz Fondazione

A sense of guilt that is also the fulcrum and hub of the very personal (as always original and visionary) version of “Macbeth” conceived and engineered by the Lenzes in their disfigured forms, hazy, nuanced videos, disturbing voices like cracks creating a carpet where the senses are lost and drain, they mix like communicating vessels, they shatter. Shakespeare's song about guilt and the ghosts that haunt the guilty person's mind here becomes a monologue (Sandra Soncini ritual vestal imperturbable) but supported by a chorus, on video, composed of the fragmented faces of patients detained in Judicial Psychiatric Hospitals (OPGs). Pieces of eyes and teeth (of those who have actually committed crimes and have committed indelible sins) projected onto a circular structure that encompasses like a placenta, protects like a hand, closes like a shutter, yawns like a confessional, which is a screen for hiding, a cave and an embrace, and a curve.

Francesca Ferrari

Applause for…

Lenz's work becomes a scenic, visionary and imaginative metaphor, capable of opening up an emotional world that is too often shunned yet true, even if capable of leading reason and feeling beyond the meaning of madness, towards a more careful reflection on the very meaning of “action” (performative and real). The dialogue between the protagonists on video and the actress alone “in person” – the intense Sandra Soncini,personification of Lady Macbeth and priestess of a theatrical rite where this intimate and profound anguish can be shared through gestures and linguistic paths - creates an indissoluble symbolic bond between real life and theatrical experience, always supported by words (in excruciating reiterations and alliterations), by physicality (shown, almost offered as a sacrifice, or simply told) and, also, by the evocative and concrete sound track (fusion of tonal, atonal and electronic music). “I did the fact” but the fact in question is no longer just the one narrated in Shakespeare's masterpiece, which is ideally aimed at anyway, nor the one hinted at in the inmates' glances on video...

Daniela Sacco

Sensitive actors at Lady Macbeth's court

The polar dialectic, tense between actor and sensitive actors, which Lenz has always recognized, plays out in Macbeth on the capital theme of the responsibility of evil, and is offered to the audience in the unresolved contrast between the conscious guilt of being rational and the unconscious guilt of being incapable of understanding and willing. This dialectic, like Benjamin's image, explodes on stage in constellations of images: it is expressed plastically through the demonic material of images, of which Lenz is well-trained. Pittito coined the expression “imagoturgy”, which seems to collect not only the active, poietic action on images, but also the Ur, their originarity without beginning in time. An originarity that, not being located in a tempor, is not simply evoked, but can only be totally given in the spatial immanence of the scenic presence. A muffling and repelling immanence with which Federica Maestri shapes the stage space in the fluid dialogue between video and physical presence.