Introductory notes by Francesco Pititto
One note, just one, repeated. The scraper passes through the file and vibrates the note.
The instruments are in the body, resting on the back – Gryllus campestris– and the note played is for her, the female.
Bodies and sounds, because crickets are there, many, invertebrates present, smelling, silent in movement. And the sound is indeed a sexual call but also a word – talking crickets – a word of lament, a drop of penitent tear for what has already happened, even if it has yet to happen. The Fact, the assassination, the betrayal, the power, the prophecy.
And the entire community of single notes rises to song, a collection of humans and invertebrates in a single choir that resounds to death. The linear course of the story has been altered, the dramaturgy has disjointed the text, indeed the two texts. Shakespeare and Piave.
Of the great people's choir, a group of adolescents remain to sing, today, the impetus of the Risorgimento and liberation. Alone among cages resonating on a single note.
The Fact has been done. Before and/or after. The time that compacts is Verdi's music.
Now the frenzy is for her and he already mourns the guilt, while the glory still does not begin.
O voluptuousness of the throne! Time merges before and after, and only the Fact remains.
The thought is formed, horrendous imago!, even if nothing exists yet.
The Lady splits into two while remaining the same, conversing with herself, one singing and one saying, while the vibrant call of caged crickets marks the time of the act.
Then come the bearded witches to with/merge desire and punishment, sex and tomorrow, prophecies.
And the unborn child, and the unborn child of a woman, and … tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
And the hands, of whom he made. And the hands that ooze stains, and the hands that wash hands, and that no longer wash any hand or stain.
I heard Me the owl screaming and the crickets watering. Not even tears wash away the Fact, but the friny flows like a torrent of love and lament, and guilt resurfaces and then guilt strikes.
And finally Hecate, deity of demons and the dead, will have to remember who really reigns over the night of the mind, over what seems true and is really real – on the horn of the moon is hanging/a drop of steam, and is falling – and comes to subvert the high and the low, to set the world of male and female, the human and the inhuman, comes to recover, in the stubborn concert of the crickets, the last breath of a poor demente.
And then he gives it, as a last prayer, to the Lady now wandering among the teeming terrariums.
I had to die, here or after… Short and sublime.
Installation by Maria Federica Maestri
The Verdi Macbeth installation consists of twenty-four terrariums inhabited by thousands of crickets and live insects whose chirping, together with Verdi's voices, constitutes the sound material of the opera. The stage space reproduces the architectural structure of the ancient sanctuary dedicated to the cult of Hecate – deity who reigns over demons and the dead – a fundamental dramatic function of Shakespeare's work. In the sacred area, the obsessive continuum of cricket singing progressively takes over the entire sound space, in a crescendo symmetrical to the obsessions of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Nature enters the installation design of the work as a fantastic and real horrifying principle at the same time. The inner landscape of torments, obsessions and fears becomes tested, a sensitive extension of the subject. The inevitability of the death-life cycle in Phisis – principle and cause of all things– does not attenuate, does not evade the responsibility for guilt, but dissolves its heroic rhetoric.
In Macbeth there are several dramatic issues regarding the psychological/fantastic/dreamlike state of the protagonists. The faces of the REMS (Residences for the Execution of Health Safety Measures) actors become the visual transfer (social, emotional) for the spectators of Macbeth and the question of the madness and visions of Lady Macbeth and her consort become living matter, a violent act remembered and reworked, a hallucination brought into focus in a dramatic and representational context of the work. A lament, a lyrical basso continuo, tragic, true.
The interpretative and linguistic lines of this new work by Lenz have been explored regarding the inexorability, inconsolability, decisiveness, and irreparability of one's actions, through the indispensable impulses of those who, locked up for decades in prisons without even the consolation (or torture) of guilt, remind us without fiction that life is truly a shadow that walks and the actor a poor idiot who struggles to tell us nothing.
The actor is not asked to reveal himself, but to give more power to the words of the text through interpretation, the rereading of his own existential parable. Actors elsewhere in time and space, actress and singers artistic corpus within a fantastic work that reworks Verdi's research into the truest and most risky of directorial modes: sleepwalking, dream and prophecy, magic and singing, poetic word and truth of “fact” and, finally, melodrama and new musical writing.
And the context in which the work grew is truly a mental prison before even a containment and rehabilitation structure from guilt. The responsibility of opening Shakespeare's verse, even if translated, in relation to the outside world is already in itself an attempt at a dramatic exit from the nightmare of guilt: the actor then truly becomes the crystal image of his past and present, the verses of Macbeth and the Lady, as well as those of the witches seem to emerge, with unknown and only minimally correct technique, like knife blades that twirl real and not fragments of a delirious dream like the long-distance dialogue, from real to virtual, from place to place, from condition to condition, from past to present time between the actor forced into his “castle” and the actress who experiences his scene.
The three witches of prophecy are shadows of the mind, presences of a suffering that tightens its gaze and projects it into the fantastic, eyes and pulsating words blood and fears, messengers of truth that concern us. Gates and deformed trees take the place of the castle, of the dense advancing Birman Forest, hands washing other hands to wash away the irreparability of the “fact”.
The Verdi Macbeth installation consists of twenty-four terrariums inhabited by thousands of crickets and live insects whose chirping, together with Verdi's voices, constitutes the sound material of the scenic opera. The obsessive continuum of their singing progressively takes over the entire sound space, in a ‘crescendo’ symmetrical to the obsessions of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Nature enters the installation drawing as a fantastic and real horrifying principle together.
