Horsehair

LPAM_LENZ FOR ALESSANDRO MANZONI

Every year Lenz Foundation dedicates a Special Project to a great intellectual/artist of Italian culture to reinterpret the work in a visual and performative key.

With the LLD project Lenz giving lectures (2021) and with LPPP Lenz for Pier Paolo Pasolini (2022) Lenz has activated an artistic path that intends to bring the thoughts of the reference figures of Italian literature up to date, and investigate its reverberations and influences in the contemporary world.

Two creations by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto dedicated in 2023 to Alexander Manzoni a 150 years after death: The video installation The Betrothed with music by Andrea Azzali and performance Horsehair, taken fromAdelchi e played by Carlotta Spaggiari with live music by Roberto Bonati, both site-specific for the former church of San Ludovico in Parma.

Con Horsehair, new inspired performative re-edition all’Adelchi by Alessandro Manzoni, Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto put the founding author of Italian literature back at the center of their performative investigation to provoke a profound reflection on the poetic power and rhetoric of the Italian language. The oratory staging is a poetic emanation of Manzoni's tragedy, il movement for a careful theoretical reflection on the contemporaneity of a complex and forgotten work of our dramatic literature.

Dell’Adelchi it is the figure of Ermengarde that is transduced into dramaturgical images that outline female bodies of irreducible beauty, never subjected to conventional constraints. Manzoni's reference imposes a reflection/refraction on the oppositional force of renunciation of the body to the point of mortal delirium against the brutality of the cliché. Ermengarda is psychophysical love, the wound of abandonment is in the body and in the spirit, the pain transfigures and cements the heroine, making her mute and hard to the demands of normal living. Margrete dal Faust by Goethe, Hölderlin's Antigone, Kleist's Penthesilea, Rosaura di Calderón de la Barca, Shakespeare's Ophelia, Lucia and Gertrude by Manzoni, Ovid's Dido and many other female figures have overlapped with each other, in theatrical time, until only one is composed, as large as an installation by Christo – the great American artist of Bulgarian origin – under which there is only emptiness, solitude and freedom like pure air.'

Ermengarda becomes an epiphany of encounter of multiple lived stories, of broken loves, suspended, postponed, forgotten, imposed and liberated, supporting figure of film sequences marked like septenary verses of a tragic chorus of the present time. Manzoni's Ermengarde represents the existential and theatrical culmination of the remission that derives from the refusal to which Charlemagne condemns her, making her an innocent victim of impotent and depersonalizing suffering. The epilogue of the tragedy is suicide as a gesture of extreme withdrawal from the self and the pain of existence. Here is another figure of a woman who loves until death and in the delirium of love communicates directly to Heaven her mortal amazement in the face of her own abandonment. Ermengarda dell'Adelchi Manzonian does not surrender to the reality of history, the one that powerful males decide, but he gives himself over completely to his own feelings, to the intimate story of a lover that all passion contains, in the unsaid, in the undeclared, in the chaste constraint within one's own ego. E, like a delirious and light Penthesilea, let Eros and Thanatos lead her by the hand beyond the edge of life. The choir, subjectively, he can only describe his reunion with Nature by singing a requiem in progress in front of his silent body. Only an equally powerful and light sensitivity of an actress can be experienced, without fiction, such a culmination of pathos and expressive power.

Nell’Adelchi History is contemplated through the internal drama of the protagonists, sublimated into a religious vision of life. Adelchi and Ermengarda are spirits full of contrasts between ideals and feelings – peace and glory for the first, the husband's still alive love for the second. They live for high and noble ideals, they understand the anguish and suffering of others and only find in death the full realization of their complex and troubled personality. Adelchi, before dying, will say that on earth “all that remains is to do wrong or suffer it”: this is typical Jansenistic pessimism, which can be contrasted with a providential conception of pain, suffering is a gift from God since it proves that no harm has been done. Ermengarda is embodied by the sensitive actress Carlotta Spaggiari. She began her training in the Lenz theater workshops aimed at neurodivergent people and became an extraordinary interpreter of numerous performative creations of the Parma ensemble: she made her debut in the role of the Nun of Monza as a child The Betrothed (2013) and subsequently he is the protagonist ofAdelchi (2014) transfusing into Ermengarde's martyr-body; goes through Ariosto's phantasmagoria like Angelica The Furious (2015-2016); he is a performer Heaven by Dante e Action T4 (both of 2017), then magnificent stage incarnation of Cassandra inOresteia of Aeschylus (2018-2021); is among the interpreters of the great Caldronian fresco of Life is a dream (2021) and co-star in the recent staging of Catherine of Siena (2022) work of the visionary romantic playwright Jakob Lenz.

This stage project substantiates the multi-year search for a pedagogical "verb" that makes neurodivergent people able to express silenced emotions through the dramaturgical-sensory stimulations of the theatrical experience. Through this process the perspective from which to look at sensitivity is reversed: the apparent cognitive and behavioral limits of sensitive people are no longer symptoms of a pathological deficit but become elements to be elaborated and translated into contemporary aesthetic language, through comparison and competition with the great classical texts.

Crine_Ermengarda oratorio
Dall’Adelchi by Alessandro Manzoni

Dramaturgy, imagoturgy Francesco Pititto
Composition, installation, wrappers Maria Federica Masters
Musical composition and performance Roberto Bonati
Interpreter Carlotta Spaggiari
Technical care Alice Scartapacchio, Dino Todoverto
Assistant Giulia Mangini
Project care Elena Sorbi
Organization Ilaria Stocchi
Press office, communication Elisa Barbieri
Diffusion, graphic care Alessandro Conti
Photographic documentation Elisa Morabito
Co-production Lenz Foundation, Nature Gods Theatres, ParmaFrontiere Cultural Association

PAINTINGS IN SEQUENCE

by Francesco Pititto

A wild boar advances in the woods, a squirrel among the branches, two snails in courtship, an old, naked man's body. A woman's face in extreme close-up, the mouth and the teeth and the eyes and speaking silently to the other self in real space, and also to you, the spectator, who observes them both. She is a hunted wild boar, surrounded and wounded, in the metamorphosis of a squirrel fleeing among the branches, dreaming – hermaphrodite – intercourse without males dressed as slugs, while a male body writhes unfit, awkward in a looping motion. She does and looks at us from the videographic table, he says without words in the darkness of a mouth that attracts and swallows the sound of the "soft braids". It is the face of the actress in dialogue with her body double, two-headed Amazon, free to die in and out of battle.

Each video frame is in black and white, except the intercourse between the two Arionids, gastropod molluscs without shells, homeless, without a shield to defend the exposed body. The color appears only for the two molluscs, changing colors in the rotary movement from top to bottom.

Notes on malacology and conchilogy.

Snails are hermaphrodites and courtship consists of a series of turns on themselves, convulsions and rubbing of bodies. They lower themselves suspended in mid-air onto a wall, attached to two thin threads of mucus. Their translucent blue reproductive organs begin to emerge from a small opening on the right side of their heads., they wrap around each other creating shapes, fantastic choreography. At the end of the intercourse both will have been fertilized.

EXPOSURE OF THE BODY IN REPUDIATE ARCHITECTURE

O

OF THE ELECTRIC NUDITY OF THE SACRIFICAL SPACE

by Maria Federica Maestri

° illuminate the remains of the ecclesial building

° restore the anatomical space of the martyr's agony

° highlight the traces of electrical devastation

Martyrdom _ For the exposition of the martyrdom of Ermengarde, the large ecclesial space of San Ludovico is revealed in its extreme nakedness.

Violence _ The violence perpetrated on the cult building must be visible in full light, deconsecrated and used as a power plant at the beginning of the twentieth century, in perfect and tragic analogy with the female body, humiliated and repudiated by the functional brutality of patriarchal society.

Lumen _ Let nothing be hidden or mitigated by the sentimental and salvific warmth of providence.

Hunting _ The space is crossed by fourteen wooden rods similar in size and shape to medieval spears for wild boar hunting.

Anatomy _ The witness/martyr church is the anatomical space of Ermengarde's hunting act and agony.

Tane _ Lions, like the animal, chased, captured, wound, bleeding, he will die seeking the darkness and peace of death in five black dens.

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