BIOGRAPHY
In the 2015 start your own business Lenz Foundation.
Founded on 13 November 2014 give her Cultural Associations Lenz Refractions e Nature Gods Theatres, collects its historical legacy (1986 for Lenz e 1996 for nature) continuing, seamlessly, and with identical rigor the action of artistic research, creation, training, international hospitality in the field of performing arts and sensitivity, but with a broader artistic project, cultural and scientific. Lenz Foundation obtains recognition as a Cultural Body Recognized by the Prefecture of Parma on 15 January 2015 and registered in the register of private legal entities.
The artistic direction of the Foundation is curated by Maria Federica Masters e Francesco Pititto, who is its President. Dal 2021 The scientific director of the Foundation is Dr. Maria Antonioni.
Lenz Foundation creates a complex project of contemporary performative and visual creations, and musical and theatrical co-productions to be created in collaboration with local institutions, national and international, of integrated laboratory practices aimed at people with mental disabilities, intellectual, sensory.
In the contemporary theater panorama the Lenz, with their scenic-installation grammar, rigorous artistic practice, the exclusive aesthetic language, the radical expressive sense, they represent a unique team, for which the word “research” continues to be the driving force of their vision. Da Shakespeare a Goethe, da Ovidio a Kleist, each new dramaturgical elaboration is an authentic journey into a vision of the world. And of man. Giuseppe Distefano – The sun 24 Ore
Büchner, Hölderlin, Lenz, Kleist, Rilke, Dostoevsky, Mayakovsky, Shakespeare, Goethe, Grimm, Andersen, Calderón de la Barca, Genet, Lorca, Bacchini, Ovidio, Virgilio, Manzoni, d'Annunzio, Ariosto, Dante, Euripides, Aeschylus, the Holy Scriptures: these are the authors and works that have marked Lenz's monographic and multi-year projects, from 1985. The recent contemporary performative creation projects are the artistic result of in-depth visual research, filmic, space, dramaturgical and sound.
In an aesthetic convergence between exegetical fidelity to the word of the text, visual radicality of film creation, originality and conceptual extremism of the artistic installation, Lenz's work rewrites the philosophical tensions and aesthetic anxieties of contemporaneity in visionary signs.
Translation, dramaturgical rewriting, imagoturgy of the works are by Francesco Pititto, who directs it together with Maria Federica Maestri. The scenic installations and costumes are created by Maria Federica Maestri, noted by critics for her work of "dramaturgy of matter", for the system of visual signs that constitute his very personal "design-acted".
Lenz expresses an artistic project recognized as one of the most original and rigorous in Italian and European research theater characterized by continuous investigative work on contemporary language. In the first phase of his creative journey Lenz reworked the great classical texts, retranscribing its poetic impulses into contemporary visions. The density of performative work is symmetrical to the intensity, exceptionality, uniqueness of the interpreters, not just 'actors’ but artistic reagents of the creative text.
In a more recent phase, visual and plastic research is at the center of poetics: the theatrical action is wedged between writing through images and the plastic creation of space, which aims to be an autonomous artistic installation. The performative action is enhanced by the exceptional nature of the performers, creative text artistic reagents.
Dal 1996 Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto have opened an active dialogue with the international contemporary art scene, through the Natura Dèi Teatri festival dedicated to new artistic research, of which they are the curators. ND'T is a project of international performance productions created for the festival and a place for intellectual reflection on the state of contemporary art. The physical and expressive space in which Lenz's creations are made is crossed by some of the most innovative and rigorous aesthetic experiences in the field of performative creation, European musical and visual. Attention to contemporary creation, the interdisciplinarity of the events presented, a strong rooting in the territory combined with a profound vocation for international performance culture are historical characteristics of Natura Dèi Teatri.
A complex project, named Theater Practices characterizes Lenz in the field of theatrical and visual training. Social Theater Practices instead it activates theatrical awareness courses, visual, musical which involve the design of integrated laboratories aimed at intellectually and mentally disabled people. This intense training activity is combined with workshops and theatrical activities aimed at schools and universities.
The great three-year project (2018 – 2021) The Imminent Past of the Lenz Foundation was part of the dossier with which Parma won the title of Italian Capital of Culture 2020+21.
The Foundation has its headquarters in Lenz Theatre a space of industrial archeology from the late nineteenth century – of about 900 m2 – located in the historic outskirts of Parma, completely renovated respecting the original architectural typology.
After the entry of the Municipality of Parma and the University of Parma into the Lenz Foundation as supporting members, the acquisition in 2017 of Lenz Teatro by the Municipality of Parma represents a definitive institutional recognition of the public and inclusive function of the artistic and educational activities of Lenz Fondazione.
