The stage project directed by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto consists of three creations: #1 Nidi from Agamemnon, #2 Latte, by Le Coefore and #3 Pupilla by Le Eumenidi; the powerful sound translation of the trilogy is designed by Lillevan, one of the most significant artists on the international electronic scene.
For a contemporary rereading of the origins of the tragic, the sensitive actresses and historical actresses of the ensemble are confronted in an essential need for fusion and in a close scenic dialogue. By implanting its own poetic signs on classical tragedy, the saga of the Atrides is confined to the aesthetic immeasurability of the psychic pathology of the characters, taking the iconology of excess and violence as the object of scenic investigation.
The tragedies that make up Aeschylus' Oresteia represent a single family story divided into three episodes, whose roots lie in the mythical tradition of ancient Greece: the murder of Agamemnon and his slave-lover Cassandra by his bride Clytemnestra (Agamemnon), the revenge of his son Orestes who with the complicity of his sister Electra kills his mother (Le Coefeore), the persecution of the matricide by the Erinyes and its final acquittal by the Areopagus court (The Eumenides).
The stage project directed by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto consists of three creations: #1 Nidi from Agamemnon, #2 Latte by Le Coefore and #3 Pupilla by Le Eumenidi; the powerful sound translation of the trilogy is designed by Lillevan, one of the most significant artists on the international electronic music scene.
For a contemporary rereading of the origins of the tragic, the sensitive actresses and historical actresses of the ensemble are confronted in an essential need for fusion and in a close scenic dialogue.
By implanting its own poetic signs on classical tragedy, the saga of the Atrides is confined to the aesthetic immeasurability of the psychic pathology of the characters, taking the iconology of excess and violence as the object of scenic investigation. Forced into mechanical hereditary conjunctions, into forced genetic conjugations father, mother and children are determined by irreconcilable psycho-moral systems and inevitably destined for an irreducible chain of destructive tasks: Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia in order to obtain the power and benevolence of the gods; Clytemnestra kills her husband guilty of murdering her daughter and together with him the innocent Cassandra; the sons – Orestes and Electra – kill their mother to avenge the murder of their beloved father.
The protagonists of the tragedy inhabit neo-mythological landscapes, places of moral coercion and emotional detention in which fears, horrors and passions that starve and devour the family corpus are materially stratified. The scenic òikos inhabited by the Family is a space of sentimental awe and ethical dissonance, in which the opposition between honor and love, obedience and disobedience, subordination and superiority can find resolution only in a degenerative act. Having killed his mother and destroyed the house, Orestes tries to escape punishment for his unnatural crime and takes refuge in an anonymous and hostile place of transit, manned by multiple figures of his mother. Duplicates of Clytemnestra's bruises, the Erinyes amplify her traits of violence and desire for revenge. Not even the sedating presence of the righteous deities, Athena and Apollo, can make up for the damage, repair the evil, but celestial vertebrates can only turn pain and anger towards emotional dullness, towards an eternal saving sadness.
In the first chapter of the trilogy the extreme state of feeling, the passion that moves and pushes towards death, the tragic killing of the hero, the mystery of the human condition take shape in the oscillation between weakness and strength, vulnerability and power of the psychic body of Cassandra, the foreign prophetess of misfortune, prey to war and slave in the house of the Atrides, refracted ray of Clytemnestra's poetic and violated physics.
The installation of the first chapter highlights a pedestal-nest that draws formal inspiration from the work of Mario Merz, in which the female characters of the tragedy – Clytemnestra and Cassandra – lay and incubate their own eggs. The desecration of the nest triggers the tragic conflict between the forces, the irreparable act that sentences their double death.
The performers of #1 Nidi are Sandra Soncini, protagonist of the most important creations of Lenz in the role of Clytemnestra, and Carlotta Spaggiari, sensitive actress, in the role of Cassandra, already an extraordinary incarnation of Ermengarda in Adelchi and Angelica in the cycle inspired by Orlando Furioso; together with them, in the function of Iphigenia and Choir, Valentina Barbarini, icon of Lenz and interpreter of Iphigenia in Aulis, first paragraph of the diptych inspired by the myth of Iphigenia.
From Agamemnon of Aeschylus
Dramaturgy, rewriting Francesco Pititto
Installation, direction, costumes Maria Federica Maestri
Music Lillevan
Performer Valentina Barbarini, Sandra Soncini, Carlotta Spaggiari
Curating Elena Sorbi
Organization Ilaria Stocchi
Communication, press office, promotion Michele Pascarella
Technical care Alice Scartapacchio, Lucia Manghi
Training Loredana Scianna
Technical assistant Marco Cavellini
Production Lenz Fondazione
Gianni Manzella
Radical «Oresteia», all female
There is no fire that lights up high up, on the walls of Argos, to announce the fall of Troy, at the beginning of the Oresteia that Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto presented at the conclusion of a dense, all-female edition of the Natura Dèi festival Theatres. After all, there aren't even the walls of Argos. It is a purely mental landscape designed for the tragedy by Lenz's two creators.
Franco Acquaviva
ORESTEA - directed by Maria Federica Maestri
It is a stratification of images, for apical moments and for long wanderings in the fabric of tragedy, of which fragments, extracted and partly rewritten nuclei remain. Details that are captured and amplified to the point of grotesque, at the same time strange.
Giuseppe Distefano
The Contemporary, and Accomplished, Oresteia by Lenz Foundation
Also of great visual and physical strength is the sequence where on a domestic table –a place of nourishment for life and death – artificial milk will be composed and poured which, when manipulated, will go from white to black, dirtying faces and hands and the space around. The acted stage installation is inspired by the Todesfuge of the German poet Paul Celan [...] and the liquid vortices of the English artist Anish Kapoor.
Maria Dolores Pesce
Oresteia
Direction and dramaturgy as usual blend with wisdom and within this refined aesthetic mechanism, the protagonists find signs of a path of awareness, a new awareness that they give us with spontaneity and also authenticity.
Emanuela Zanon
No doubt about the semi-divine essence of the characters on stage, who move with feral royalty alternating uncontrollable hysteria, sudden aphasias and lilting sequences of liturgical gestures that involve the spectator in a primary theatrical experience in which even catharsis seems to be a further sinking into the contradictions of an impossible dystopian ethic.
Enrico Piergiacomi
Imagoturgia e imagot(e)urgia. Sul tema della rinascita in "Iphigenia in Tauride" e "Nidi" di Lenz Teatro.
In technical terms, Nidi embodies the ancient concept of the miasma on stage [...] every tragic picture always generates new and different horrors, this time without an apparent form of salvation [...] Clytemnestra and Cassandra both show themselves lying on the bed, posing as parturients and indeed in the throes of childbirth, which however will only lead to the killing of the prophetess and Agamemnon. This is the point at which the miasma reaches its peak: even in the sacred act of being born, in fact, what arises is only new death and not an innocent life.
Valeria Ottolenghi
A work of boundless richness on an interpretative level, many symbols, the visual passages and dance theater actions are of notable effectiveness.
Caterina Barone
Oresteia by Lenz Foundation: a magmatic tangle of passions, violence, crime and catharsis
The work done by Lenz Fondazione on Aeschylus' Oresteia throws its soundering into the essence of the Tragic and uncovers its magmatic tangle of passions, violence, crime and catharsis.
