Lenz Refractions

Büchner, Hölderlin, Lenz, Kleist, Rilke, Dostoevsky, Mayakovsky, Shakespeare, Goethe, Grimm, Andersen, Calderón de la Barca, Genet, Lorca, Ovidio, Virgilio, Manzoni, d'Annunzio: these are the authors who have marked the monographic and multi-year projects of Lenz Rifrazioni starting from 1986. Founders and creative directors of Lenz are Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto. The contemporary performative creation projects are the artistic result of in-depth visual research work, 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 Rifrazioni rewrites 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". The original music is by Andrea Azzali (Monophon), musician experimenter of electronic processing and compositions. The ensemble has its creative headquarters in Lenz Teatro, an industrial space from the 1940s – of about 1000 m2 – located in the historic outskirts of Parma, completely renovated respecting the original architectural typology.
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 artistic journey (1986-2006) Lenz Rifrazioni has reworked the great classical texts, retranscribing its poetic impulses into contemporary visions. In a more recent phase – starting from 2007 – at the center of poetics is visual and plastic research: the performative action is wedged between writing through images and the plastic creation of space, which no longer has the functional limits of the scene but tends to be a real art installation. 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.
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 production project of international contemporary performative creations designed for the festival and a place of 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.