Purgatory

Giulio Sonno

We are talking about an artistic-political dialogue (both specifically in Parma and in the general of city-society) that is unparalleled in the Italian panorama. Lenz's ability to refract the sacred in the profane remains indisputable once again.

Valeria Ottolenghi

With Lenz, aesthetic dialogues between the languages of theatre are increasingly becoming fascinated by forms and meanings: here, roots with popular reality, in what had been a place of care, of assistance to the sick in the heart of the city, are bouncing back into the vast space that had therefore housed the State Archives. Memoirs. And the performers, who mostly move with handlights that alter, along with those dark bands around their heads, their facial features, become the souls who, in dialect, still remember and experience the moods that agitated them in life, anger for example, but also hunger and sexual desire.

Daniele Rizzo

Purgatory is an authentic historical, as well as scenic, ecosystem in which, recovering with infinite respect the dignity of the work of which it is voice and body, every single word and every act performed refracts Lenz's awareness of continually rethinking the space of art as a necessarily preparatory condition for every artistic experience

Giuseppe Distefano

Every site-specific installation creation by Lenz, always performative-musical, is a human and aesthetic experience, a physical and mental journey that is difficult to forget, such is the power of meaning, the urgent dramatic research that drives it, and the physical work that is subjected to the creative process then activated with the decisive involvement of the spectator-traveler, restoring the dimension of reciprocity.

Franco Acquaviva

The building is that of the former Old Hospital – State Archives. Monumental fifteenth-century Greek cross structure, surmounted by a dome with very high vaults, reinterpreted as Purgatory through the lens of Dante's canticle. And the reason for this choice is immediately clear, since the functions of hospital or archive ultimately imply waiting, lost to the hope of healing in one case (and, in Purgatory, of eternal life), or inverted into an ideal of conservation in the other; however, even the atmosphere that pervades this place recalls a purgatorial climate, underlined by the lighting, which keeps that vastness in a continuous twilight, only broken by the punctual blades of cold light of LED lamps brandished by the actors in order to highlight faces and bodies with a different plastic relief from time to time; or by the flashing of that stick set in LEDs which Cato (Franck Berzieri), guardian of Purgatory, holds himself while walking decisively in the nave with a limping walk of extraordinary power.

Matteo Brighenti

Purgatory in Lenz Fondazione is a limbo of dust and deserted wooden shelves, 18 meters high, up to the ceiling of the Ospedale Vecchio in Parma. Ossuaries of books and stories forgotten, removed, lost, from which the souls of the dead seem to come begging attention. They confess their sins, because they are here, they say them to explain to themselves the pains and the hope of salvation, perhaps they would even do them again, if they went back.

Francesca Ferrari

They scream, they curse, they stir those figures, desperate shadows that wander in desolation and darkness, illuminated only by faint handlights that transfigure the faces and the path of proxemics, emblems of a human condition that recomposes itself outside of time, in a philosophical and metaphysical non-place of mind and soul, ideally bringing us back to the profound, universal meaning of the literary work on which the work rests.

Tania Bedogni

Entering the first arm of the Cruise, being enveloped by the smell of dust and the emptiness that reigns in the enormous bookcases, raising our gaze to the white vaults of the central dome, places us back in our position as men, small, among the thousands who over time have passed through this place of welcome and suffering […] Time here has become more space than ever, infinite, eternal, punctuated by our pause and Dante's stripping of as many petticoats as sins, in a dim light illuminated only by agile LED light bars that move from hand to hand and voice to voice to illuminate the dusty faces of the actors

Francesca Serrazanetti

One of the archive's tall, scenic iron staircases, built on wheels, will become the staircase leading to Paradise, where Beatrice awaits Dante. Right here, in the contrast between the small human dimension and the large numbers projected on the back wall of the nave and with the 18 meters of height above our heads, we stop before the last atonement. Thus, before leaving the Cruise, we experience for the last time the power that has arisen from the relationship with space, the true strength of this work by Lenz. Tiny in a void that takes on an almost divine aura, we retrace the trail traced by our steps and glances.

Andrea Alfieri

In this middle land we become involved in a liturgy of signification. Tenaciously faithful to his poetics of artistic inquiry, Lenz appropriates architectural voids, regenerating them in an immersive experience, swallowing participants in a multiplicity of languages and expressive transitions. An experience that translates into real civic action, allowing citizens to reconnect with its cultural and urban heritage through the tangibility of theatrical action.