The baroque philosophical-theological drama perfectly represents the thematic question that headlines the entire project: the imminent past. The Farnese monument between historical period and contemporaneity, the dramaturgy that isolates life and dreams in the same space-time (and vice versa), and the relationship between urban space, collective enjoyment, and active memory configure a hypothetical framework of synthesis and design for the capital of the future.
The perception of individual time through multiple artistic forms (installation in space, video-projected images, live performances, musical dramaturgy between Baroque, modern and contemporary) favors that common time – together with the common space, the city – necessary to outline community identity and new perspectives.
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
Jean Luc Nancy writes: “Art called contemporary is not simply what can be dated to today. It is called contemporary because it does not inherit any form or reference. It cannot be the art of the sacred nor that of glory, nor that of a supposed nature or destiny of peoples. It inherits only the enigma brought by this word – ART – which was invented when all the figures of a possible “representation” began to be subtracted. It is contemporary with its own wandering and the always uncertain and trembling birth of forms that would be typical of a failed encounter of all the properties received”.
We think that contemporary time is necessarily discontinuous, the contemporary artist adds, divides, takes away, replaces his own time, “feels” it in the intimate, relates it to other times, sinks into the past and tends towards the future. “In contemporary times everything has yet to happen. And together it has already happened” as Marco Belpoliti acutely reflects. And what happens is the present, our present.
If then modern physics –especially quantum physics– tends to exclude the existence of Time, and tells us that the moment that comes is not equal to the moment that precedes it, and that there is no linearity but only concentric motion of atoms moving in space, and that sensation is only subjective and only determined by motion, then our research has some basis.
The constant refractions in classical work, whether literary, poetic, or visual, therefore become, for us linguistic practice, constant in aesthetic research, in the metamorphosis of forms and signs, in the repetition of history; a wandering and uncertain investigation, Paul Celan would have written with a stammer.
The Great Theatre of the World, to be built in collaboration with the Pilotta Monumental Complex, and the staging of Pedro Calderón de La Barca's La vida es sueño, first in the form of a contemporary auto sacramental and then in the staging of the drama in all the spaces of the complex, constitute our three-year proposal.
The baroque philosophical-theological drama perfectly represents the thematic question that headlines the entire project: the imminent past. The Farnese monument between historical period and contemporaneity, the dramaturgy that isolates life and dreams in the same space-time (and vice versa), and the relationship between urban space, collective enjoyment, and active memory configure a hypothetical framework of synthesis and design for the capital of the future. The perception of individual time through multiple artistic forms (installation in space, video-projected images, live performances, musical dramaturgy between Baroque, modern and contemporary) favors that common time – together with the common space, the city – necessary to outline community identity and new perspectives.
The Pilotta Monumental Complex can represent that common space that hosts the different times of collective and individual history, as an inclusive hub of the different souls of the Polis -. Students from the Toschi art high school and other schools in the city, the Arrigo Boito Conservatory and various choirs, the University (the University of Parma is a supporting member of the Lenz Foundation), and students from the Cinema District will be able to actively participate in the project, through practical workshops, as documentary filmmakers for the entire experience. Each stage of set-up will make use of advanced technological systems that will document its work in progress and, in particular for site-specific, the most advanced video and sound representation techniques will be employed.
To view this content, you need to enable the “experience” cookies using the corresponding toggle. You can do this by clicking the iconat the bottom right.
To view this content, you need to enable the “experience” cookies using the corresponding toggle. You can do this by clicking the iconat the bottom right.
To view this content, you need to enable the “experience” cookies using the corresponding toggle. You can do this by clicking the iconat the bottom right.
By Pedro Calderón de La Barca
Dramaturgy, imagoturgy Francesco Pititto
Installation, direction, costumes Maria Federica Maestri
Performer Valentina Barbarini, Franck Berzieri, Monica Bianchi, Lara Bonvini, Matteo Castellazzi, Lorenzo Davini, Eugenio Maria Degiacomi (basso), Paolo Maccini, Valeria Meggi, Sandra Soncini, Carlotta Spaggiari, Barbara Voghera. Musicisti: Francesco Baroni, Sara Dieci, Luciano D’Orazio, Francesco Melani, Alessandro Trapasso, Alessio Zanfardino
Musiciants Sara Dieci, Alessandro Trapasso, Luciano D’Orazio, Alessio Zanfardino, Francesco Monica e Francesco Melani, clavicembalisti diretti dal Maestro Francesco Baroni
Electronic music composition and reworking Claudio Rocchetti
Curating Elena Sorbi
Organization Ilaria Stocchi
Press office, communication Michele Pascarella
Technical care Alice Scartapacchio
Media video Stefano Cacciani
The Grande Teatro del Mondo is a stage project by Lenz Fondazione, created in collaboration with the Pilotta Monumental Complex, with the support of AUSL Parma – DAI SM-DP, the Instituto Cervantes de Milán, and with the contribution of MiBACT, Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism, Emilia-Romagna Region, Municipality of Parma, Cariparma Foundation, and Monteparma Foundation.
Artistic partners: Arrigo Boito Conservatory of Music of Parma and Ars Canto G Association. Verdi White Voices Choir and Youth Choir.
Technical partners: AuroraDomus ONLUS Social Cooperative, Koppel AW
The project is an integral part of EnERgie Diffuse Emilia-Romagna, a heritage of cultures and humanity and 1618-2018 Four hundred years of the Farnese Theatre in Parma, events awarded the 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage label.
Giuseppe Distefano
It evokes a whirlwind of emotions. Physical, mental, spiritual. And of visions, which open the gaze and prompt resonances of memories and words, of places and stories, of past and present. Between vertigo of light and shadow, it touches the heart and mind. It envelops and engages us, spatially and internally, like a great embrace that everyone and everything contains.
Matteo Brighenti
Once again Lenz animates the hidden and the unconfessed of the place and makes it the main source of light […] For Pititto and Maestri the Farnese monument is the dramaturgy that encloses life and dreams in the same space-time, between historical period and contemporaneity, individual enjoyment and collective memory. An encyclopedic embrace of the differences, of the possibilities of the human being. With eyes closed wide open.
Matteo Bergamini
It is a show that is at times moving and at times funny in its paradoxes and in the replication of thousand-year-old patterns, in the irony of fate, in the roulette of roles […] And it is truly chilling to be able to enter these spaces outside of opening hours, glimpse paintings “burned” by the headlights that illuminate the actors' positions and discover very strong shadows, watching characters so compelling that they seem to have materialized outside these oils on canvas after nearly 400 years.
Alessandro Rigolli
A vision capable of drying out the Baroque ills of the literary place from which it originates, as of the physical place where it took on new form, to restore to us an alienated dramatic evocation in whose interstices, between varied and repetitive visual projections, the interventions of Claudio Rocchetti's sound compositions and electronic reworkings flashed sharply, with the alienating counterpoint of the various harpsichords scattered throughout the stage space.
Giulio Sonno
Lenz, while preferring aesthetic research, is distinguished by a rigorous political connotation, etymologically speaking, which eschews the spectacularization of touring and large-scale theater to reactivate the history of abandoned places, outcast humanity, and neglected tradition, without however flying the flag of urban regeneration, social theater, or the actualization of the classics, respectively.
Daniele Rizzo
Pititto and Maestri propose the distortion of a metatheater as a space of gravitation in which individuals structure themselves as elementary particles, whose motion is constant, random, and necessarily brought about by encounter/clash, and whose narrative is not flat and continuous, but formed by interaction and only exclusively through it.
Franco Acquaviva
A directorial-dramaturgical practice that manages to produce a synthesis of disturbing beauty, as oriented by the alchemistic instinct of “coniunctio oppositorum”, in a release of occult, latent energies […] It is a theatrical thought of sacred and simple solemnity that of this work by Calderón-Pititto, which regulates the actors' entry onto the stage with the opening of two doors: the cradle and the tomb.
Enrico Piergiacomi
Calderón de la Barca makes the dream dimension a path of moral purification. Pititto and Maestri resort to it to propose a thought similar to the one Polonius formulates by observing Hamlet's “madness”: there is a method in that madness that is our existence.
Valeria Ottolenghi
An event of extreme expressive refinement on the conceptual level and for its realization, three main stages «stations» of knowledge as in a sacred representation […] superb multiplication of theatre within theatre.