Triennium 2022-2024

Lenz for a contemporary and inclusive performance language

A radical fidelity to the word of the text, eviscerated, translated and adapted for the stage, an original site-specific scenic installation work filmic creation and musical composition define Lenz’s segnigraphy. The performative action is wedged between the writing for images and the plastic creation of space, which no longer has the functional limits of the stage but tends to be a true art installation.

A strong system of visual signs substantiates the design-acted of the creations: the material dramaturgy of the stage and costumes, the visual and sound technographies applied to the performance characterize the plural language of Lenz. The relationship with the image is so ingrained in artistic practice that he invented the neologism imagoturgy, or the ad hoc creation of visual works in close connection with dramaturgical writing and stage installation.

Today, the need for hybridization with other languages has become unavoidable, through the opening to new frontiers: immersion, integration, hypermediality, interactivity, nonlinear narrativity proper to the digital system. The creation of interactive theatrical environments constitutes a new field of action that does not replace live theater but redefines it in other possible aesthetic paradigms, in the same way that in Lenz’s works the musical component is a fundamental element of dramatic construction.

A highly innovative process is the installation of the creations in forgotten or unusual places, monuments of inestimable value that are hardly accessible to the public because they are destined for non-tourist use or closed due to lack of resources, heritage ignored and concealed from the citizenry.

Lenz has matured the need to merge with social being in a condition of fragility, vulnerability, weakness, suffering, marginality, in search of a profound renewal of contemporary theatrical language. Since the 2000s, it has been carrying out performance projects aimed at subjects who in the past have been excluded from artistic knowledge and processes: people with mental and intellectual disabilities, people with addiction disorders, neurodivergent adolescents, have become sensitive protagonists of the artistic act in the full exaltation of their own identity.

The contamination between genders wants to stand as a vector in bringing people who by social or registry conditions often remain outside of it closer to the contemporary language, as well as in supporting empowerment, female leadership and gender equality in the working group, and encouraging the entry of younger generations and people with disabilities into the artistic, technical and organizational ensemble.

Holy Scriptures

An aesthetic reflection on the literature of the sacred in the Christian religion will give scenic body to an interpretive project composed of theatrical, musical, choreographic, visual, and installation creations, in close concatenation with philosophical, scientific, filmic, social, and political researches, in order to activate a broad field of representation of the present.

In 2021 Lenz started the project dedicated to the Holy Scriptures with The Creation special project commissioned by MAECI Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

In 2022, research on the sacred texts of Christianity will continue with Numbers, ideally referring to the Book of Numbers as the fourth book of the Old Testament. The numbering of beings, the census that lists and names bodies to be re-recognized, the wayfarers in the desert as witnesses to the trial of pain and redemption, will be new subject matter for reflection/action on human beings at the time of their greatest crisis and their prospects for survival, at the end of a progressive deterioration of their living space.

In 2023 and 2024, the end point of the research will be represented by the Apocalypse and Gnostic Apocalypses as reflection/action on the unveiling, as the possibility of the truth of things. To then start again, having added to the eternal return of the always the same, an instant of diversity, of change, of revolution in the present of theatrical art.

Lenz by Lenz

Staging project of the works of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, through four re-edition creations: Catherine Of Siena, Lenz since Georg Büchner, Shakespears Geist, The Soldiers. Inspirational figure in 1985 in the birth of the artistic formation Lenz Rifrazioni (now Foundation) is a German playwright who lived in the late eighteenth century, a theologian and man of letters who died mad in Moscow at the age of only forty. Jakob Lenz expresses a strongly anti-rhetorical view of the crisis of Western man, anticipating with pre-Marxist sensibility the great themes of the twentieth century: anti-militarism, social injustice, violence against women, and criticism of patriarchy and dominant male power.

Resistance

As part of an ongoing theatrical and visual project on the themes of the Resistance and the Holocaust, the Foundation makes an annual creation for the April 25 Celebration. TR2/4 will focus on the role and biography of Partisan Women of the Parma Resistance, in collaboration with the Parma Historical Institute of Resistance and Contemporary Age.

Bestiary _ Animal Feminine

Twelve member artists will be invited, over the three-year period, to co-produce twelve paths that will investigate the themes of gender roles, anti-specism, ecofeminism, and overcoming dualisms. Hybridizing philosophy, mythology, sciences and the arts, the frame of reference studies will be the theoretical corpus of American philosopher Donna Haraway in the direction of the advent of the chtulucene through the creation of Kinship based on the recognition of affinities and differences and the possibility of coexistence. The project includes the articulation of the program into national and international residencies and productions, transdisciplinary workshops and seminars, and presentation of performances.

Training

The workshop is the state in which dramatic wisdom, scenic philosophies and techniques of the living are transfused, and it is the time in which the human passes through itself to fully fulfill its artistic and poetic destiny.

Theater practices_PDT permanent project for theatrical training aimed at learning the codes of contemporary performative language.

Social Theater practices Theater awareness workshops carried out in collaboration with local agencies and institutions for people in fragile conditions: Lab Autism, Lab Mental Disability, Lab Neuropsychiatry, Lab Kids Educating Differences, Lab Women with Substance Addictions.

Performing care Laboratory RO.CA. project section of thought, research and artistic action dedicated to Rocco Caccavari, honorary president and scientific director of the Foundation from 2008 to 2021. Bio-film documentation project aimed at marginal communities and discriminated social groups.

Webinars

Audience development/engagement project aimed at creating a broader and more informed audience that is an active subject of the artistic act. The critical refraction/post-production of the work and the dissemination of the creative processes that innervate Lenz’s language are the subject of a multi-year seminar program.

Lenz Hall series of meetings moderated by theater critics aimed at viewers and college students for the purpose of introducing them to the reading of new creations.

Lenz Rooms discussion meetings between artists-in-residence and viewers

Historical research laboratory Outreach meetings aimed at students and teachers to learn more about the permanent project Resistance.

Tongue of Sensitivities ongoing focus on working with sensitivity and the accessibility of the art world for people with disabilities.

Women’s seminar project scholars and curators of the contemporary scene discuss issues such as language and gender critique.

Visions Contemporary language literacy workshops aimed at people with mental disabilities.

The expressive body. Performativity, embodiment, neuroscience Participations in the series of seminars on the points of contact between stage practice and neuroscience, sponsored by the University of Parma.

Accessibility Empowerment Sustainability

The presence in the artistic and production team of people with disabilities and activation of pathways aimed at nullifying the inequalities imposed by gender roles, ableism and the use of the over-extended masculine at the linguistic and communicative level.

Installation of magnetic induction system as part of the Emilia-Romagna Region project ACCESs, Accessibility Communication Culture and Subtitles for Deaf People. The installation of the system will enable deaf people with cochlear implants to enjoy acoustically with fullness the events that will be presented in the halls of Lenz Teatro.

Collaborating on the implementation of the programmatic plan outlined in the World 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Lenz engages in activities aimed at fostering sustainability – rationalizing and limiting energy and material consumption and increasing the digital accessibility of its platforms and the physical accessibility of its spaces.

Lenz Theatre

Theater is physical body: the action of the body in the field of a scene creates meaning and emotion, empathy, denunciation and renunciation, anthropology and philosophy, history and the present, sometimes the future.

Body is also the place of creation: the historical seat of artistic training since 1989, Lenz Teatro lives in the post-industrial spaces located in via Pasubio, in Parma, in a former suburban and working-class neighborhood that has been the subject of intense urban redevelopment in recent years. Here the traces of an industrial past, of which isolated sections of important archaeological value survive, coexist with innovative contemporary architectural experiments in a European-style typology of urban redevelopment.