Creation of the Teatro Regio di Parma for the 2026 Verdi Festival
Dramatic exfiltrations from the lyric drama in four parts with a libretto by Temistocle Solera, from the drama Nabuchodonosor by Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois and Francis Cornu.
Dramaturgy, imagoturgy_Francesco Pititto
Composition, installation, costumes_Maria Federica Maestri
Sounds_Andrea Azzali
Music consulting_Adriano Engelbrecht, Lorenzo Marchi, Victoria Vasquez Jurado
Performer_n. 20 performers with physical disabilities
n. 30 children_adolescents of the Children's Choir of the Teatro Regio in Parma
The installation design, which will unfold across various spaces of the Pilotta_Museo Nazionale Monumental Complex, features 200 teddy bears scattered throughout the Petitot Gallery of the Palatine Library, symbolizing the homeland of girls and boys exiled from their childhood, wounded by the violence of war, who return to sing their ‘raw lament’ in the symbolic place of culture and art in the city of Parma.
The Palazzo della Pilotta was in fact bombed in May 1944, during the Second World War, by the Anglo-American air offensive, and deeply wounded: that night over 15,000 precious volumes of the Palatine Library were destroyed, the Farnese Theatre and many parts of the building were severely damaged. Traces of that devastation are still evident today in the southern and western wings of the Complex.
The work aims to be a moving testimony to a double violence, a double loss, a double mutilation: that of childhood and that of cultural heritage. Performers will make themselves the voice of humanity broken, forgotten, invisible, silenced by the violence of war scenarios. They will be exempla of that humanity that we do not want to look at because it reflects the inability to demand justice, fairness, love for the Other of the majority of the living.
Performers and audiences will compose a single, large body to which tangible and cultural wounds have been inflicted, dashing hopes of returning to the time of fullness, carefreeness, perspective, to one's own land and language or dialect, to scents and flavors, to loves; a mutilated body that continues to scream verses, recreating, for that space/time, its own experience and the present together.