Events

NATURE OF THEATRES #25

Performing Arts Festival

TOUCHING 2018-2020

NDT 2020 > POSTPONED TO 2021

EFFORT | ALL WOMEN

ALINA MARAZZI
10 NOVEMBER
Cinema Edison d’Essai
In collaboration with Invenzioni dal Vero_Parma Film Festival

6.30 pm UN’ORA SOLA TI VORREI (2002) | 55’
Direction | Alina Marazzi

Un ora sola ti vorrei is the first documentary film by Alina Marazzi, the foundation of her poetics, made entirely with family footage – a portrait of her mother who died prematurely.

8 pm Talk with Alina Marazzi
with Michele Guerra and Jennifer Malvezzi

8.45 pm TUTTO PARLA DI TE (2012) | 86’
Direction | Alina Marazzi
Interpreters | Charlotte Rampling, Elena Radonicich, Valerio Binasco, Maria Grazia Mandruzzato, Alice Torriani, Marta Lina Comerio, Emiliano Audisio

Tutto parla di te is the first fiction film by Alina Marazzi, a feature film on the dark side of motherhood.

MARIANGELA GUALTIERI | TEATRO VALDOCA
11 NOVEMBER 8.45 pm
In collaboration with Segnali di Vita_Il Rumore del Lutto
IL QUOTIDIANO INNAMORAMENTO | 50’

In this new sound ritual, Mariangela Gualtieri gives voice to the verses of the latest poetry collection she published with Einaudi, When I wasn't dying, interweawing them with earlier ones and composing the whole into a well-orchestrated rhythmical score. The challenge here is to create what Amelia Rosselli called a ‘phonic enchantment’, the acoustic immersion plunging each person into their own self and at the same time holding the community of those present in a brotherly sense of aliveness. This is entirely derived from the certainty that poetry can attain its highest communicative power through orality, from mouth to ear, in a ritual where the audience’s listening can be as inspired as the writing process and the speaking voice.

MARIA FEDERICA MAESTRI_FRANCESCO PITITTO | LENZ FOUNDATION
11 + 12 NOVEMBER 10 pm
13 + 14 NOVEMBER 8.45 pm
THE ORESTEA #3 PUPIL

13 + 14 NOVEMBER 7.30 pm
THE ORESTEA #1 NESTS #2 LATTE (video)

The tragedies that make up the Oresteia by Aeschylus represent a single family story divided into three episodes, whose roots are rooted in the mythical tradition of ancient Greece: the murder of Agamemnon and his lover-slave Cassandra by his wife Clytemnestra (Agamemnone), the revenge of his son Orestes who with the complicity of his sister Electra kills his mother (Le Coefeore), the persecution of the matricide by the Erinni and his final acquittal by the court of the Areopagus (Le Eumenides). The scenic project directed by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto consists of three creations: #1 Nests from Agamemnon, #2 Latte from The Choephores and #3 Pupil from Le Eumenides; the powerful sound translation of the trilogy is designed by Lillevan, one of the most significant artists on the international electronic music scene. For a contemporary rereading of the origins of the tragic, the sensitive actresses and the historical actresses of the ensemble confront each other in an unavoidable need for fusion and in a close scenic dialogue. By implanting their poetic signs on classical tragedy, the Atridi saga is confined to the aesthetic immensity of the psychic pathology of the characters, assuming the iconology of excess and violence as an object of scenic investigation. Forced into mechanical hereditary conjunctions, into forced genetic conjugations father, mother and children are determined by irreconcilable psycho-moral systems and inevitably destined to an irreducible chain of destructive accomplishments: Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia in order to obtain the power and benevolence of the gods; Clytemnestra kills the spouse guilty of the murder of his daughter and with him the innocent Cassandra; the sons – Orestes and Electra – to avenge the murder of their beloved father kill their mother.

ANTONELLA OGGIANO | ALESSANDRO BEDOSTI
12 NOVEMBER 8.45 pm
DAS SPIEL (with Antonella) | 50’

The game (The game) is a performance that deals with the theme of Death in a composed and dreamy way.
In an unusual afternoon ritual, celebrated at snack time, hit by sudden and new illnesses, I played the game of Death with Antonella, her face covered with a small white cotton handkerchief.
The result was a carefree funeral ceremony, an extravagant carousel of crosses and chairs, a childish, serene and frightening game, suspended slightly on the mystery of Life.
Now, a few years after its creation, I wish to question Death in me again, the Death that I bear as an ancient and precious seal, a mystery that guides my steps and gives them meaning.
Here it is, The game (with Antonella). With Antonella, yes. Who seems to ride the wave of these questions, imperturbable, mysterious, perennial.

ALESSANDRO BEDOSTI | MARIA FEDERICA GESÙ
12 NOVEMBER 10.45 pm
È BELLO ANCHE NON ESSERCI | 13’ (Videoinstallation)

It is a small artistic manifesto that addresses the theme of presence, artistic creation, and the relationship between work and public. And he calls into question his old companions: Rainer Maria Rilke and Simone Weil.

TRAGEDIA, TEATRO, DÈI NEL PENSIERO DI NIETZSCHE
13 NOVEMBER 6.30 pm
Lectio Magistralis by Susanna Mati | philosopher

What’s the role of tragedy, theatre, gods (particularly Dionysus) in one of the most influential modern philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche? And above all: are tragedy, theatre and divine necessary for thought itself? Is a theatrical, scenic effect always related to philosophy? All human knowledge belongs indeed to that reality which is called by Nietzsche “appearence” (Schein); and appearence is an intrinsecally tragical scene. What’s therefore the relationship between thought and the original element of tragedy, myth? And what’s accordingly the relationship between thought and theatre? In this talk we would try and answer those and other questions, through the great philosopher’s untimely meditation and through his life itself.

ANTONELLA BERTONI | COMPAGNIA ABBONDANZA/BERTONI
14 NOVEMBER 6.30 pm + 10 pm
C’È VITA SU VENERE | 15’
Première_Creation for ND’T #25

I will circumnavigate around the given theme: EFFORT, a distant destination today, yet present. The journey has started and with him, the waiting for the moment of grace, which will bring out the gesture that by its nature will be “out of date”, out of time and out of fashion. This is my only way to fight the ephemeral of our time. The shipwreck will always be lurking and in the sea I will be alone.

CECI N’EST PAS OBSCÈNE
15 NOVEMBER 3-7 pm
Symposium by Silvia Mei | live arts scholar and theater historian

The symposium aims to give voice to a difference, the feminine one, and to reaffirm one’s own subjectivity in the ways of living the world and of founding languages, by inviting artists, directors, curators, philosophers, historians, journalists, activists. The title of this intergenerational meeting refers to the cry of the Femen activists in the last flashmob at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (“This is not obscene”), when a visitor could not enter the museum because of her dress, considered “too much low-necked”. Can one therefore act like a woman, as the English expression woman up urges, but giving voice on one’s condition, beyond a self-awareness or an action of rebellion? Trapped in a paradox, between the overcoming gender identities and sexist discrimination, we aspire, as women, to reaffirm our difference and to start from there to claim equality, beyond empty formulas and quotas. We are promoters of communal utopias, of ecological messages, of human and humanitarian challenges. We know, moreover, that it is difficult to tackle such issues without the risk of ideological positions or radical tones. We will then start from evidence, from irreducible details: that is, from poetics, practices, biographies, models and aspirations. We start from the reality of our being and our desire for the future.

STEFANIA ?ALOS PEDRETTI
15 NOVEMBER 9 pm
THE CHAOS AWAKENING Ritual | 50’
Première_Creation for ND’T #25

With the Ritual The Chaos Awakening ?Alos continues and deepens her research into the mystical, magical, shamanic and pagan side of music and voice. Potnia theron, Artemis, Cybele, Diana, Eris, Hecate, Moire dee, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern myths, the magic of origins. Eclipses, puffs, wind, the coordinates of this ritual transport us far in time and to the South / East of the globe. With the Ritual ‘The Chaos Awakening’? Alos continues and deepens his research of the mystical, magical, shamanic and pagan side of music and voice. After the elements Earth and Water, his attention shifts to Air and Fire. A ritual to awaken the chaos that surrounds us and that is deep within us all. Live is a ritual, an experience that takes the audience to another place and time, a sonic and emotional journey. What happens is all to be discovered.

MARIA FEDERICA MAESTRI_FRANCESCO PITITTO | LENZ FOUNDATION
18 + 19 NOVEMBER 8.45 pm
FLOWERS LIKE STARS? | 50’
From The constant prince by Pedro Calderón de la Barca
In collaboration with Segnali di Vita_Il Rumore del Lutto

Flowers like stars?: displacement, deviation, drift towards a world that is not a reflection of the aesthetic-moral universe of Calderón. Escape from the baroque and escape from the convention of the dramaturgy of suffering of The constant prince, a masterpiece that, re-read and transcribed by Grotowski, has refounded the theater of the second half of the twentieth century. At the centre of our work is the life of Fenix, a very intense and contradictory minor character: she is the character of questions. Valentina Barbarini, young but no longer very young, merges with the irreducible function of asking: the anxiety of the unanswered question fully corresponds to her being both iconic and solitary, strong and very fragile. The scenic system envelops her, “velifies” her: it superimposes further filters on her, screens that blur the clarity of a possible answer to the only unanswered question: Is God Man?

DORIS UHLICH
18 NOVEMBER 10 pm
EVERY BODY ELECTRIC | 75’ (video)

Doris Uhlich creates individual and communal “forms of energy dance” in this ensemble piece for people with physical impairments. Every body has specific abilities to articulate its dynamism and its carnal pleasure. The movements themselves allow the body to charge itself up, acting as a kind of fuel produced naturally in the body. Every Body Electric is a radical invitation to explore potentials through the medium of dance, to make them visible and delve deep into an archaeology of energy. What else becomes possible if machines – such as wheelchairs, prostheses, crutches – are not perceived as obstacles but as extensions of the body and are also staged as such? Personal rhythms, dynamics, beats and physical characteristics result in very individual dance styles. Ultimately, the topical relevance of Every Body Electric but also its poetry, oscillating between gentle and forceful, lie in the way it alters both the self-awareness and the perception of these bodies.

CRISTINA KRISTAL RIZZO
19 NOVEMBER 10 pm
TOCCARE the White Dance | 60’

Touching means existing. It has to do with the life of shapes and their possibility to find a measure, to let bodies plainly rest in space. The choreographic concept behind TOCCARE_the white dance is implementing an aesthetical experience which unveils the power of touching as a founding gesture of both the world of tangible bodies and intangible matter, and the true intimacy of a radically open sensory perception. The primacy of touching is part of a thought system whose main feature is being singular/plural while acknowledging that we are open to the other equally from the inside and the outside. Touching the other means touching all the possible others, including oneself, including what is intangible in the tangible. It also means radically rethinking the nature of being and time. Touching then is like approaching the world of an individual which is endless exposition. It means being here, side by side, and creating bodies’ compositions without thinking of getting back to oneself. It is exciting the extension and extending the emotion in a simultaneous encounter which coincides with existence itself.

CLAUDIA SORACE | MUTA IMAGO
21 NOVEMBER 7.30 pm
BARTLEBY | 40’ (video)

Bartleby is the second chapter of the trilogy of American Tales: narration by sound and images inspired by the famous text of the same name by Herman Melville. The tale is told in first person by an elder lawyer presenting the story of the strangest man he has ever met: Bartleby, a scrivener he hired in his office who slowly ends up by changing his world.

CHIARA GUIDI | SOCIETAS
21 NOVEMBER 8.45 pm
EDIPO RE DI SOFOCLE
ESERCIZIO DI MEMORIA PER 4 VOCI FEMMINILI | 60’

In Sophocles’ tragedy, nothing that is said is also seen, and the peripeteia is entrusted solely to words and the sound of the voice. It is Oedipus who requests this: “I’m surveying every word”, and thus the act or ability of speaking, the faculty of speech and locution, becomes a verbal and musical image, a slender body made of air that leads the hero to his agnition.Only with the voice – reading letters, syllables, vowels and consonants which, just as in cosmogonic myths, in their minimal units of sound, bear within themselves the mystery of the representation of the world – does Oedipus discover the truth of his own destiny: being the imaginary son of his father.He discovers this with a voice that comes from the bowels, from an interior that can in no way coincide with what the eye is able to see and understand. The mouth opens. The voice comes out and, with its sound, brings the enigma back to itself, compounding it.

MARIA FEDERICA MAESTRI_FRANCESCO PITITTO | LENZ FOUNDATION
21 NOVEMBER 10 pm
22 NOVEMBER 7.30 pm
VIOLENT HIPPOGRIPH | 50’
from Life is dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca

The rebel horse is a mythological animal similar to Pegasus, half horse half bird, the same one that in the Furious Orlando takes Astolfo to the moon. The violence and power of his momentum are limitless, descending down a mountain. And above Rosaura, who bursts onto the scene. Violent hipógrifo,/ who runs even with the wind,/ where, ray without flame,/bird without range,/fish without scale,/and brute without instinct/natural, to the confused labyrinth/of these naked rocks/destruct yourself, soar and disrupt yourself? What’s left of lightning if you take away its flame, or a bird without feathers and colors? And what of the fish if you take away its scales? Or the beast without its instinct? Its disharmony is reflected in reality, chaos is the beginning of this drama. So is diving without brakes and without wings, down a cliff regardless of one’s weight and the impossibility of flight. As if defying divine power. As if to anticipate the challenge of the protagonist Sigismondo prisoner in the Tower, the final boundary of this crazy race. Sigismondo is also, like the hippogriff, half man and half beast ready, once free, to dive unbridled into the real world. Rosaura, descended from her horse, will then speak with the multiple voices of her other self – Prince Sigismondo – in an attempt to recompose a poetic fresco that can contain the chaos of the world.

LA BUONA UTOPIA
Cultural actions in civil society as propellers of new relational and community models
22 NOVEMBER 3-6 pm
Seminar by Elena Sorbi | project curator of Lenz Foundation

When does a cultural action produce a change? And how can we talk about it? In a historical period in which the definition assumes significant importance and the signifier is fundamental to ensure the meaning is a guarantee of existence, we ask some women active in the cultural field to share the words necessary for their project to generate new worlds. Apparent utopias described by terms such as sustainability, equity, accessibility, feminism, transfeminism, interculture vs cultural appropriation, gender medicine, intersectionality, activism, regeneration, and characterized by a goodness of action that is concretizing reality of the imaginary in (physical , social, virtual) of communities.

PREFIGURAZIONI
26 + 27 NOVEMBER 7.30 pm
Photographic exhibition by Fiorella Iacono
Première_Creation for ND’T #25

These images document details and movements that precede the work that will take place on the scene. These are objects, glimpses of movements, expressions that run through some of Lenz’s works Foundation since 2016: Auto-da-fé, Purgatory, Paradiso_Un pezzo sacro, Il grande teatro del mondo and their site-specific settings in the monumental architectural complexes of Parma: the Napoleonic Wing of the former prison of San Francesco, the great Cruise of the Old Hospital, the Ponte Nord, the spaces of the Pilotta Complex and the Farnese Theater. An iconography of waiting, prefiguration and announcement of the imminent stage act.

FRANCESCA RUGGERINI | LENZ FOUNDATION
26 NOVEMBER 8.45 pm
27 NOVEMBER 6.30 pm + 8.45 pm
UNITED TOWARDS HER | 30’
From The New Consciousness of Mary Magdalene by Adele Venneri
Première_Creation for ND’T #25

“It takes an act of trust. To believe the voice. To believe in the true essence. To believe that we are called to, called for, called through, called despite. It takes an act of faith to be faithful”. Starting from the analysis of the figure of Joan of Arc, we investigated by reflecting on the fusion of three fundamental points: vision / listening / transformation. “The voice that speaks, when it speaks, is perhaps the divine that is in each of us. It is perhaps the creative that manifests itself. This voice is either listened to or silenced. This voice burns. This voice pushes, presses, screams”.

COLLETTIVA ARTESTE
27 NOVEMBER 7.30 pm
Presentation

The ARTESTE COLLECTIVE arises from the desire to bring together women with broad intellectual, political, social, civil, human sensitivity who do not belong to the artistic sphere in a shared context. In this meeting they will talk about their projects, seeds of a research that will reach a germination in 2021.

LENZ FOUNDATION
LA VITA È SOGNO_STUDIO #1
17 DICEMBER 6 pm
Outcome of the laboratory in collaboration with the P. Corsini Multifunctional Center, Pathological Addictions Service, Self-help groups AUSL Parma

LENZ FOUNDATION
18 DECEMBER 5 pm
LA VITA È SOGNO_STUDIO #2
Outcome of the laboratory_Special project House of Health for Children and Adolescents

The itineraries created within Natura Dèi Teatri # 25 are part of The imminent past, a three-year project by Lenz Foundation for Parma Italian Capital of Culture 2020 + 21: performative, choreographic, visual and sound site-specific installations conceived and directed by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto in collaboration with the musician Claudio Rocchetti.

The project consists of the contemporary installation of three works by Pedro Calderón de La Barca: the autos sacramentales The Great Theater of the World (2018) and The life is dream (2019) and, initially planned for 2020 and subsequently postponed to 2021, the staging of Life is dream, a key work of Western theater.