Muta Imago | productions | Don Giovanni (looking for)
Project and direction Riccardo Fazi,
Claudia Sorace |
Drama / Sound
Riccardo Fazi |
Stage setting Massimo Troncanetti |
Production
Muta Imago,
Villa Celimontana Jazz Festival 2006 |
Costumes
Daniela Pellegrini |
Performance
Daniele Fior,
Simona Frattini,
Jamila Suarez,
Roberto Testa
The group rediscover and reinvent the myth of Don Giovanni. Starting from a study of Mozart’s music, a show has been realized, based on the interaction between four performers and a big stage structure made of three wooden cubes and a swimming pool.
Through the constant manipolation of the stage elements and an intense and precise coreography the performers try to give body to the stories connected with the main charachters of the myth: stories that are born and die at the same velocity at which they’re being built.
Riccardo: The work on Don Giovanni hadn’t been easy: for the context, the huge stage setting, the short period of reharsals, but, mainly, for two reasons. First of all, a lot of time had passed since we had worked starting from a pre-existent text: we had been working for two years on original materials. The second reason had to do with the nature itself of the main charachter. Don Giovanni is not a real charachter: is a myth. He is not like Hamlet or Antigone and this is something that we immediately understood. There’s not a story around him, a plot. Of course, there’s a killing, the desperation of Donna Anna, the statue, the final confrontation, but Don Giovanni’s nature is circular, repetitious, not linear. His story is built around a spiral of revolutionary actions stopped at the end only by the divine intervention. It’s a hard material to handle, from a dramaturgic point of view. Tirso’s, Moliere’s, Mozart’s, Frisch’s Don Giovanni are all variation of the same main figure: an hymn to life that Don Giovanni himself represents. We had to structure, dramatize and give shape to that hymn. That’s why we immediately decided not to work on one of the different Don Giovanni that had been wrote in the past: we wanted to work directly on the myth using our way of working that proceeds through images, situations, moments, atmospheres, actions. Following Kierkegaard we got mostly affected by Mozart: in his music the essential is reflected: the desperate fight for the survival of a free soul. That fight, that energy we wanted to put on stage. Starting from a basic datum. For us, Don Giovanni was dead. And we desperately went on stage to look for him.
Claudia: In order to do so, first of all we had to create the right physical situation. We needed an obstacle to fight, strong performers that could move not only their bodies, but the space around them. A group that could work as an ensemble in order to express with its only presence the deep nature of this myth.
Then, there’s another element that has been fundamental for the project: our Don Giovanni was supposed to appear at night, in a public park, after a jazz concert. Don Giovanni’s visions and the vision of the show collide in the idea of the three cubes of different dimensions. And the cubes themselves are the obstacle and the necessary meeting point for our four performers in order to let them make appear and disappear moments of life, fragments of stories, remembrances of our myth. Inside an open space the cubes allowed us to focus the glance in one point, and then in another one: a firm focus of the vision, but at the same time, a dinamic focus that could change suddenly, manouvred by the performers themselves.
The park was our ally, because it was from the dark and the silence of the trees that our tale got born, and, when everything was over and destroyed, at that dark and silence we got back.
Massimo: And then, there is the water: vital and refreshing vision, place of a continuous return to life, in an almost spiritual sense.
Everything starts from the pool: the cubes open and dilate in the space; and in the pool everything ends: that’s where Don Giovanni gets killed,symbolized on stage by a red cloth. The red cloth hung from above, destiny that falls down on the charachters.
The group rediscover and reinvent the myth of Don Giovanni. Starting from a study of Mozart’s music, a show has been realized, based on the interaction between four performers and a big stage structure made of three wooden cubes and a swimming pool.
Through the constant manipolation of the stage elements and an intense and precise coreography the performers try to give body to the stories connected with the main charachters of the myth: stories that are born and die at the same velocity at which they’re being built.
Riccardo: The work on Don Giovanni hadn’t been easy: for the context, the huge stage setting, the short period of reharsals, but, mainly, for two reasons. First of all, a lot of time had passed since we had worked starting from a pre-existent text: we had been working for two years on original materials. The second reason had to do with the nature itself of the main charachter. Don Giovanni is not a real charachter: is a myth. He is not like Hamlet or Antigone and this is something that we immediately understood. There’s not a story around him, a plot. Of course, there’s a killing, the desperation of Donna Anna, the statue, the final confrontation, but Don Giovanni’s nature is circular, repetitious, not linear. His story is built around a spiral of revolutionary actions stopped at the end only by the divine intervention. It’s a hard material to handle, from a dramaturgic point of view. Tirso’s, Moliere’s, Mozart’s, Frisch’s Don Giovanni are all variation of the same main figure: an hymn to life that Don Giovanni himself represents. We had to structure, dramatize and give shape to that hymn. That’s why we immediately decided not to work on one of the different Don Giovanni that had been wrote in the past: we wanted to work directly on the myth using our way of working that proceeds through images, situations, moments, atmospheres, actions. Following Kierkegaard we got mostly affected by Mozart: in his music the essential is reflected: the desperate fight for the survival of a free soul. That fight, that energy we wanted to put on stage. Starting from a basic datum. For us, Don Giovanni was dead. And we desperately went on stage to look for him.
Claudia: In order to do so, first of all we had to create the right physical situation. We needed an obstacle to fight, strong performers that could move not only their bodies, but the space around them. A group that could work as an ensemble in order to express with its only presence the deep nature of this myth.
Then, there’s another element that has been fundamental for the project: our Don Giovanni was supposed to appear at night, in a public park, after a jazz concert. Don Giovanni’s visions and the vision of the show collide in the idea of the three cubes of different dimensions. And the cubes themselves are the obstacle and the necessary meeting point for our four performers in order to let them make appear and disappear moments of life, fragments of stories, remembrances of our myth. Inside an open space the cubes allowed us to focus the glance in one point, and then in another one: a firm focus of the vision, but at the same time, a dinamic focus that could change suddenly, manouvred by the performers themselves.
The park was our ally, because it was from the dark and the silence of the trees that our tale got born, and, when everything was over and destroyed, at that dark and silence we got back.
Massimo: And then, there is the water: vital and refreshing vision, place of a continuous return to life, in an almost spiritual sense.
Everything starts from the pool: the cubes open and dilate in the space; and in the pool everything ends: that’s where Don Giovanni gets killed,symbolized on stage by a red cloth. The red cloth hung from above, destiny that falls down on the charachters.
