Other State

In a continuous textual mirroring, the classical duality of the dramatic couple of the prince/servant characters (Sigismondo/Clarino – the gracíoso/fool of Spanish baroque dramas) is removed from its elementary and simplifying sociological truth.

The figure of the graceful man by Calderón de la Barca appropriates Sigismondo's verses, suspended between reality and fiction, placing himself in the same human condition as the protagonist, on the same threshold between truth and dream, past and present, imagination and reality.

Forced into the single psychic body of the extraordinary sensitive actress Barbara Voghera, already Shakespearean fool in Lenz's Verdi Re Lear, prince and servant chase each other in search of a single identity with the only certainty that ‘there is no escape from the force of destiny and cruel fate; so every gesture is therefore in vain, if you want to escape Death it is certain that you will go to die’.

Barbara Voghera has been part of the Lenz ensemble since 1999: a long inexhaustible theatrical passion that has developed extraordinary artistic results over time.

In the previous historic staging of La vita è dream (2003) he played the fool, Clarino, servant of Prince Sigismondo, a stage function framed in a fairly conventional duality, similar to that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: the thin and sad prince accompanied by the funny servant, plump and always hungry. In Another State we want to overcome this conservative vision of the servant-master relationship, a figuration of a predictable social dialectic, to bring the tension of this dramatic duplicity back into a single subject. In Barbara, the two souls of Life is a dream coexist –always in struggle –: the awareness of the tragedy without escape to which Man is destined and the desire to escape the dominion of reality by giving shape to an inverted world, freed from laws and rules, from divine and state conventions and impositions.

This oscillation between the two ethical-dramaturgical polarities is the interpretative field in which the actress is immersed, in a searing existential mirroring: the real condition of chromosomal alteration destines to an objective subordination, to a concrete subtraction of power, to a lesser possibility of self-realization. To this fate –marked by ‘an importunate star’ (like that of Fenix in The Constant Prince) Voghera contrasts a subversive artistic fury, a will to revolt that does not subject itself to psycho-physical evidence, irreducible beauty and strength versus the arrogant violence of social norms and conventions.

In real time it replaces the suspended time of theatre and converts the narrow world of life into a broad, poetic world, a New World (Friedrich Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles).

The sentimental body of Voghera establishes an instant emotional closeness, a lightning-fast psychic alliance with the spectator: Barbara does not oppose being seen for what she is, but superimposes an unexpected and unimaginative expressive power on the spectator's gaze/screen.

In discontinuity with the Hamlet Solo, of which she is an extraordinary interpreter, Altro stato asks us to give shape to a key space and a very different modus recitandi: Hamlet's heroic close-up is replaced by a long field, a denied space, a vision in backlight distancing and anti-rhetorical. The partial subtraction from direct vision reduces the emotional rights of the external gaze. The organic manifestation of the Sigismondo/Clarino duo is replaced by a mechanical counterpoint, the constant presence is replaced by the intermittency of absence, the stage life is replaced by its inanimate representation, the clarity of reality is replaced by the dreamlike pressure of the shadow.

From the Sancho Panza of Cervantes to the good soldier Sc'veik of Hashek. There is a great affinity between the Clarino/Barbara of Calderón de la Barca and the two other servants characterized by the same aversion to the eccentric behaviors of their respective masters, whose will they are forced to obey. Both want to escape the harsh reality of violence, war, death.

If then the second of these (the anti-soldier of Hashek, reread in a pacifist and universal key by Piscator and Brecht who will bring it to the stage in Berlin with the puppets designed by Georg Grosz) becomes a virtual semblance, a dreamlike and imagoturgical silhouette for the gracious/real fool, everything is suspended and the key theme of free will and grace forcefully resurfaces; as with the Kleist dancer, in Über das Marionettentheater, at the end of his communication of metaphysical aesthetics: ‘We see that to the extent that in the organic world reflection becomes weaker and/or darker, grace appears more and more radiant and imperious’.

Here then the real puppet Sc'veik accompanies Clarino/Barbara on the path of the soul, both engaged in the search for the common center of gravity, united in a mechanical and divine dance together. ‘Thus grace is also found, after knowledge, so to speak, has crossed the infinite; so that, at the same time, it appears most pure in that human structure which has either no or an infinite consciousness, that is, in the puppet, or in God’.

Barbara Voghera has been the protagonist since the beginning of the year 2000 of some of the most important performance projects of Lenz, a central figure in the decades-long investigation by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto on the renewal of the contemporary stage language through artistic dialogue with otherness.

An exceptional performer in the various drafts of Hamlet (included in the international Global Shakespeares archive of MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an authoritative recognition of research on Lenz's sensitive actor), he is a multifaceted presence in the trilogy dedicated to Goethe's Faust; extraordinary performer in the first version of La Vita è Sogno by Calderón de la Barca in the role of Clarino, interpretation the subject of a study seminar as part of the most important Spanish Baroque Theater Festival, will be staged again in the site-specific staging at the Pilotta Monumental Complex for Parma 2020 | Italian Capital of Culture.

Among the numerous other roles played in these twenty years of work, it is worth mentioning at least those of the protagonist in Snow White and Tom Thumb in the Grimm Project (on tour in the major European capitals) and in Deliver us, little girl, your eyes taken from the opera by García Lorca Caperucita Roja; the Fool in the opera Verdi Re Lear, special commission of the Verdi Festival 2015 and Bradamante in the two-year site-specific project inspired by Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. In 2019 she is on stage at the Farnese Theater in Parma with Hamlet Solo, a powerful solo in which Voghera gives body and voice to Shakespeare's masterpiece. In 2019, he plays Orestes in Aeschylus' Oresteia #2 Latte.