Produced by Teatro di Roma – Teatro Nazionale in collaboration with Spellbound and the support of the Lazio Regional Office of Culture and the Arts, the project debuted at the Sagra Musicale Malatestiana in 2016.
Staging, set, lights and video by
Luca Brinchi and Daniele Spanò
dramaturgy and philological and artistic analysis
Erika Z. Galli and Martina Ruggeri (Industria Indipendente)
On stage:
performer Davide Pioggia
music Franz Rosati
costumes Gucci
In the video:
Lorenzo Anzuini – Aminta
Clelia Scarpellini – Silvia
voices
Michael Schermi chorus and Satyr
Francesco Bonomo chorus and Thyrsus
Giorgia Visani chorus and Daphne
Michele Degirolamo Aminta
Flaminia Cuzzoli Silvia
Torquato Tasso’s celebrated Aminta, suspended between theatre and love-struck opera, with its characters set in a mythical past and dramatic turning point rich with stimuli and events, becomes, thanks to Luca Brinchi and Daniele Spanò, a project which unfolds through the intersection of different genres as they experiment with diverse artistic languages. Theatre, contemporary art, and set design for fashion and musical performances fuse to tell the story of conflict between the institutions of civil society and the laws of nature. The production’s thematic and visual nucleus is formed around regret for the Golden Age: a mythical place and time where man lived free from constraints. Amid feelings of freedom and urges, it offers a profound reading of human life. As if a prophecy, the opera highlights the fall of human certainties and the desire to surrender oneself to the grandeur of nature and her implacable forces. They recreate a mythical place and time in which man lived free from constraints, an ideal era in which human beings were able to fully enjoy the fruits of nature and love, solely animated by freedom and instinct, in absence of civil law which impedes behaviours considered “excessive”. “Se ei piace, ei lice” (If it feels good, it is good) doesn’t just express the feeling of freedom and urges; it also offers a profound interpretation of human life. It’s the feeling embodied by the Satyr, the sole witness to Arcadia. Sensual, erotic and instinctual pleasure, bestial and pure, is lamented by the chorus – a lost past where rules were tacit and essentially non-existent, and nature hadn’t yet transformed the instincts of her creatures into guilt. Aminta and Silvia live in eternal adolescence, the time in every individual’s life in which the earth-shattering characteristics of the Golden Age emerge.