Switzerland – Verdi's “La traviata” with the shadows by Teatro Gioco Vita
The opera returns to the stage of the LAC in Lugano and opens the new season 2022-23 with Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata.
After the success of Gioachino Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia, Carmelo Rifici signs the direction of Verdi’s masterpiece accompanied by Maestro Markus Poschner conducting the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana (OSI) and the choir of the Swiss Radio and Television.
It is a production by LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura in co-production with the OSI and in collaboration with LuganoMusica.
An important setting, in which Rifici chose to be joined by the artistic team he had already worked with in Il barbiere di Siviglia – set designer Guido Buganza, costume designer Margherita Baldoni, light designer Alessandro Verazzi, and choreographer Alessio Maria Romano –, and to collaborate for the first time with Nicoletta Garioni and Fabrizio Montecchi of Teatro Gioco Vita, the Piacenza-based company that for over fifty years has brought the art of puppetry and shadow theatre to the world.
The shadows of La Traviata, called to the stage by Carmelo Rifici’s directorial intuition, shun any narrative role and place themselves at the service of a purely ontological dimension of the story, to give body to the ghosts of Violetta and the blind world surrounding her. "Helped by plays of light and shadows, I let Violetta move in a space of memory and love", we read in the the director's notes, which also explain their function.
“The many figures and shapes these shadows bring on the stage also refer to a macabre multitude of beings who accompany us in the dark heart of a human society where everything – rituals, rules, and behaviours – moves in the balance between a monstrous that disturbs and frightens and a grotesque that derides and amuses.
(…) Thanks to the drawings by Nicoletta Garioni – with primitive and ancestral features, which are transformed for the scene into as many silhouettes with a great iconic impact –, and to the projective devices designed by Fabrizio Montecchi and Anna Adorno, the shadows of La traviata stud the tragic path of Violetta. Like ineffable presences inhabiting the places of the story, their apparitions are each time epiphanies of a disturbing « elsewhere ». They arise from furnishings and objects, and manifest themselves everywhere, on the walls as well as on the floors and on the veils, with the determination of who knows he is, even without having a voice, a merciless witness to a piercing cry of pain”.
With this and other wide-ranging collaborations that intersect different artistic languages (such as the one recently joined with the Ricci Oddi Gallery in Piacenza), Teatro Gioco Vita confirms its project of participation and sharing of visions and experiences, of artistic and cultural goals with other cultural organizations.
La traviata is scheduled on September 2, 4, 6 and 8.
All information and insights:
https://www.luganolac.ch/lac/about/produzioni/stagioni/stagione_22_23/la-traviata/home.html