THE BETWEEN – video installation
LPAM Lenz For Alessandro Manzoni – Dedicate to 150 years after death
Video installation > dal 24 al 3 October 2023
Musical live set by Andrea Azzali > 3 November 2023
Crine_Ermengarda Oratorio > dal 22 al 25 November 2023
Seminars Contemporaneity of Manzoni's language > 25 November
Every year the Lenz Foundation dedicates a prize to a great intellectual/artist of Italian culture Special project for rereading the literary work in a visual and performative key. With the project LLD Lenz Lecturer (2021) and with LPPP Lenz by Pier Paolo Pasolini (2022) Lenz has activated a path that intends to bring the thoughts of the reference figures of Italian culture up to date, and investigate its reverberations and influences in the contemporary world.
Two creations by Maria Federica Masters e Francesco Pititto dedicated in 2023 ad Alessandro Manzoni a 150 years after death: the video installation The Betrothed with the music of Andrew Azzali and performance Horsehair, taken from Adelchi and performed by Carlotta Spaggiari with live music by Roberto Bonati, both site-specific in the San Ludovico Gallery in Parma.
✩ The Betrothed – video installation
dal 24 October to 3 November h 16:00 – h 20:00 [closed on Sunday]
San Ludovico Gallery, Parma [map]
✩ Finissage – Live-set – Andrew Azzali
3 November h 19:30
San Ludovico Gallery, Parma [map]
The deconsecrated church establishes a providential space-time for the large video installation de The Betrothed, physical-digital transposition of Manzoni's historical novel, founding work of the Italian language regenerated with anti-rhetorical extremism by Lenz and interpreted in 2013, by sensitive actors and actresses, former long-term mental patients and people with intellectual disabilities, matured in over twenty years of theatrical research that is unique in Europe for its intensity and expressive results.
A “total spectacle” that “shocks, strips away, excites", say the words of the critic Fulvius Fulvi on Avvenire after the original debut, because the work shows how people with mental disorders know how to extract deep disturbances and fears from their souls to lend them to Manzoni's characters. Characters that the critic Giuseppe Di Stefano on Il Sole 24 Hours of 28 November 2013 defines it like this: “They act without filters, between truth and representation, adhering to their experiences and their emotions, controlled by recited words, "this", which act as a grill, simultaneously creating a distance and identification with the characters of the story. History of humble, of the last, of excluded, of simple ones. As they are."
The taking possession of Manzoni's characters by these "magnificent humble" becomes a simultaneous bread revolt and a rebellion against oblivion. The recited text is a composition of original fragments, poetic dissertations, re-elaborations filtered by different memories, substrates of life episodes actually experienced or imagined, polyphonic concert continuously re-entering and exiting again in the main lane of the original textual reference.
A dramaturgy, that of The Betrothed, That Francesco Pititto defines 'free': “The multiplication of characters – two Lucias, three nuns from Monza (little girl-old woman) – the schizophrenic fusion with timbric alteration in a single actor of the Unnamed and Cardinal Borromeo, the arbitrary attachment of Don Rodrigo's death taken from "Fermo e Lucia", the choreographic tremor of Don Abbondio and his questioning of physical love, they are some of the most significant metalinguistic passages afforded by a dramaturgy as free as a Shakespearean blank verse.”
The aesthetics of the image of The Betrothed as always in Lenz it is dramaturgy of matter, in this case the masterpiece of Italian literature is broken down into twenty-four performative and visual paintings installed inside an incubator space: each room delimited by light and translucent walls with moving images, elongated, as in Gothic stained glass windows, and the sound composed of music, voices and sounds that flow everywhere, enveloping performers and spectators together in a common destiny. “The spectator's vision is free and itinerant in the “Land of Bright Rooms” – he explains Maria Federica Masters, composer of the work, author of the installation and of the costumes/wrappings - with an invitation to stop on the beds where they acted in the performance of the 2013 the actors and actresses, to take its place in a symbolic exchange of dramaturgical functions and existential hybridizations.
Il finissage of the video installation is scheduled for 3 November at 19:30 with live electronics in strong performative conjunction with the installation, of the sound designer and composer Andrew Azzali, author of the sound design of The Betrothed, dissolution and recomposition of the “Requiem” that Giuseppe Verdi wrote in homage to Alessandro Manzoni, a few days after his funeral. In particular, the song “Lacrymosa” is re-dramatized within the dramaturgy of The Betrothed generating different textures, from the densest and most magmatic ones to the most rarefied ones. Nel concerto live electronics, in collaboration with the Segnali di Vita Association | The Sound of Mourning, Azzali will create further synthetic-electronic reworkings of Verdi's requiem, with sound additions by the musician Giorgio Cantadori.
Ticket office:
Video installation >>
Free entry
Concerto Live Set >>
Full price €12 | Reduced €8 (under 30, student*, DOC card, AUSL employees)
Info and reservations:
info@lenzfondazione.it | Telephone 0521 270141 | Whatsapp / Mobile phone 335 6096220
