VIOLENT HIPPOGRIPH

The rebel horse is a mythological animal similar to Pegasus, half horse, half bird, the same one who will take Astolfo to the moon in Orlando Furioso. The violence and power of his momentum are limitless, going down a mountain. And above Rosaura who bursts onto the scene. violent hippogriff,/that run even with the wind,/dove, flameless ray,/bird without range, /scaleless fish,/and brute without instinct/natural, at the confused labyrinth/of these naked rocks/you free yourself, you rush and crash?

What remains of lightning if its flame is taken away?, or of a bird without feathers and colors? And what about fish if you deprive it of its scales? or the beast without its instinct? Its disharmony is reflected in realities, chaos is the incipit of this drama. As well as diving without brakes and without wings, down a cliff regardless of his own weight and the impossibility of flight. As if to challenge divine power. As if to anticipate the challenge of the protagonist Sigismondo, prisoner in the Tower, the final limit of this crazy race. Sigismondo is also him, like the hippogriff, half man and half beast ready, once free, to dive without brakes into the real world.

Rosaura, dismounted from the horse, he will then speak with the multiple voices of the other himself – Prince Sigismund – in an attempt to recompose a poetic fresco that can contain the chaos of the world.

I offer myself to be an enigma,/perchIt is I am not what I seem/nIt is I look like what I am.

Each job imposes its own language, a specific approach methodology: not just the text, but to stage physics. The dramaturgy of the three new ones soli Calderonians – Other state, violent hippogriff, Flowers like stars? – it is a refraction of the actresses' biography. Il Solo indica, in a vocal or instrumental work, the parts entrusted to a single voice or a single instrument, and more broadly a performative act performed by a single performer; actually if you think about the artist's condition of solitude on stage, this adjective fully gives us the existential measure of this creative process.

The relationship between our research on Calderón's works and the biography of the performers is very important. Baroque theater is generally considered a theater of allegorical identities: One represents All, the parable of Man applies to all humanity. On the contrary, in our reading of Calderón the function of negative or ambiguously positive heroes – such as Sigismodo, Rosaura, Clarino, Fenix, Fernando – exalts weakness, vulnerability, the disturbances of those figures, transforming them into disturbed and disturbing subjects.

We chose to give substance to these three suns by modulating the lives of the ultra-feminine characters like a meta-biography: they already tell, in a circular future, what these three performers experienced intimately and artistically. These three works tell three biographies but also three indissoluble artistic unions.

Sandra Soncini embodies a very long piece of our history, an artistic conjunction that began in the late 1980s: a really long period, intense, with departures and returns. This loving oscillation reinforces the meaning of this new work of ours, Hipfromviolent tap: we left the Castilian accent, to indicate the dynamic intention already in the sound of the first word-voice, the jump, the tear, the gasp, the existential gallop of the interpreter/character.

Sandra Soncini played Rosaura ne Life is a dream seventeen years ago: This Hipfromviolent tap he certainly has memories of that scenic experience, but it has a profoundly different aesthetic substance. Hipfromviolent tap non extracts simply Rosaura from the overall context of the work – Life is a dream – but it stratifies the textual dimension by wedging the inflections of the antagonist Sigismondo into the dramaturgical design.

Francesco Pititto, who takes care of the dramaturgy, gave shape to a 'box' personality, to weave, a chessboard figure, whose presence manifests itself as a mosaic of moods, of conflicting passions and impulses. Through these character oscillations we have given psychic body to our own Hippogriff, in search of a stage biography that places existential failure in the foreground, the unstable identity of the subject in the contemporary world.

In a tangle of different and apparently disconnected sequences, the interpreter's performative journey is marked by an unstoppable dramatic pantoclasm: from a garrulous puppet disguised as a man to a tearful and violent child-puppet, from an immoral and onanistic male to a dysphoric and shapeless female, from a mystic in a state of alteration to an androgynous and grotesque mask.

With the performer – Sandra Soncini – an immediately physical vision of the work prevails, since his artistic path comes from dance, but it changes almost suddenly, for a kind of aesthetic miracle, in strong verbal tension. I believe that in Italy there are very few actresses with these characteristics. Sandra mixed it up, without suffering, the two souls of dancer and actress: the work is born about her and with her. violent hippogriff he is naked: it does not need decorative scenographic apparatus or technological artifices, but it is displayed in an installation structured in anonymous material segments in iron, which deform and injure the tender belly of pillows with a whitish and lardy softness. The merciless human body makes space among those plastic features of interrupted lives/dreams, deformed, implacable and strident.

Sandra Soncini began her artistic journey as a dancer, perfecting himself with various choreographers including Carolyn Carlson, Teri Weikel, Michele Abbondanza, Fabrizio Monteverde. Dal 1986 al 1990 dance with the Era Acquario Company directed by Thierry Parmentier and Lucia Nicolussi Perego. In the 1990 participates in the Lenz Rifrazioni Danza project dedicated to Satie and Nel 1991 he began his theatrical practice with Lenz Rifrazioni Teatro. At the same time he dedicated himself to teaching dance and choreography. In the 1995 choreographer About the puppet theater. Essay on Marionette theatre, for the Dance Dramaturgy Laboratory - Theater Practices and takes care of the choreographic movements of Lenz Rifrazioni's productions The fight of the blind with the pig e The Schroffenstein family. In the 2000 collaborates with Franco Scaldati and Lenz Rifrazioni in Ur-Hamlet, in which she plays the role of Ophelia. In the three-year project dedicated to Faust by Goethe edited by Lenz Rifrazioni (2000_2002), plays the role of the protagonist, finally arriving at a synthesis of the three years of work in 2004 in Faust Memories, monologue directed by Maria Federica Maestri. Always in 2004 is the protagonist of the monologue Black Factory and J. from the cross, directed by Francesco Pititto, with whom he also collaborates on the staging of Bacchini's poetic texts, Eliot, Pound, Pastures, Yeats, Rilke. He continues his relationship with Lenz by performing Catherine of Siena at J.M.R. Lenz, participating in projects on fairy tales based on Grimm (snow-white e Tom Thumb) and Andersen (Red Shoes), to the revival of the theatrical work dedicated to Bruno Longhi and the Calderón de la Barca trilogy (2003_2006): Life is a dream, The Magical Prodigious, The constant prince. In the 2006 delves into the poetics of J. de la Cruz with the monologue songs of the soul always directed by F. baby boy. In the 2008 debuts with the performance Io, taken from Metamorphosis of Ovid, regia at M.F. Masters. At the same time, the collaboration with the Compagnia Accademia degli Artefatti directed by Fabrizio Arcuri began, participating in the production of One Day e di Save, find the treasure and repeat in M. Ravenhill. In the 2011 he is the interpreter of the episode Burial, the first of five performative chapters of The Isle of Dogs of Lenz and in the same year he participated in the new production of Accademia degli Artefatti Orazi and Curiazi di Brecht. In the 2012 he debuts with Accademia degli Artefatti Blood on the cat's neck by R.M. Fassbinder e con Taking care of baby di D. Kelly. In the 2013 directed by M.F. Maestri reinterprets the monologue Pentesilea di Kleist. In July 2014 presents, directed by F. Arches, Sketches and FaustIn & Out the. For Jelinek, and then debuted in the full version with FaustIn and Out – Goethe's Faust upside down inside out. In the 2016 collaborates with Lenz, debuting as the protagonist in the staging of Macbeth, da Shakespeare, together with the guests of REMS – former Judicial Psychiatric Hospitals – and taking part in Auto-da-fé, installation site-specific and performance set in the Napoleonic Wing of the former San Francesco prison in Parma, commissioned by the Verdi Festival 2016, e Romeo and Juliet Concert, proposition by the composer Carla Delfrate, score for actresses' voices only. In the 2017 is among the interpreters of Paradiso. A Sacred Piece by M.F. Masters and F. baby boy, commission of the Verdi Festival 2017 starting from Four Sacred Pieces in G. Verdi, second part of a project dedicated to Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. In the 2018 reinterprets the monologue inspired by the figure of Faust in a new version, Faust Memories by Goethe directed by M.F. Masters. Participate in the creation site-specific The Great Theater of the World, Lenz's project for the Pilotta Monumental Complex on the occasion of 400 years of the Farnese Theater in Parma. She plays the role of Lady Macbeth again in Verdi Macbeth, scenic and musical work created by Lenz on special commission from the Verdi Festival 2018. In the 2019 participate in the project Oresteia, playing the role of Clytemnestra in Oresteia #1 Nests e Oresteia #2 Latte directed by M.F. Masters. Participate in The life is dream, auto sacramental of Calderón de la Barca, site-specific curated by Lenz in the North Wing of the National Gallery of the Pilotta Monumental Complex in Parma.

VIOLENT HIPPOGRIPH
and Life is a dream by Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Translation, playwriting | Francesco Pititto
Regia, installation, costumes | Maria Federica Masters
Interpreter | Sandra Soncini
Musica | Claudius Rocchetti
Care and organization | Elena Sorbi, Ilaria Stocchi
Press office, communication, promotion | Michele Pascarella
Technical care | Alice Scartapacchio
Technical assistant | Marco Cavellini
Media Video | Doruntina Film
Production | Lenz Foundation
Duration | 50 minutes

trailer:

whole wheat:

An activity of expungement and cutting, also with fragments in the original language, which recalls certain disguises by Edoardo Sanguineti, also for the total freedom regained for the text and its full availability to the scene [more].

Maria Dolores Pesce, Dramma.it

Instinct is left unchecked, the natural order of things is subverted by a continuous exchange of genders, attributes and qualities that make tangible the idea of ​​a psychic cosmos that draws strength and nourishment from chaos [more].

Emanuela Zanon, Juliet Art Magazine

Hippogriff has as its backdrop an expanse of long innocent tubes (a topos of the company) cut and arranged on cushions that soften their contact with the stands, pure metallic, on which they rest, in an aesthetic clarity that has the dignity of an installation [more].

Carlo Lei, Krapp's Last Post

What remains of the original key question? So what is life?? A dance of vulnerable figures, disturbing, passionate, impulsive, without memory, whose face is left with a Death mask, ancient, tribal, with white lead, pitch black eyes and blood red lips [more].

Francesca Ferrari, Theaterpolis