| by Georg Trakl
translator and director Cesare Lievi scenography and costumes Daniele Lievi
lighting project Gigi Saccomandi with Emanuele Carucci Viterbi, Maria Alberta Navello, Cecilia Campani, Jacopo Crovella, Marco Cupellari, Ermelinda Pansini
production Centro Teatrale Bresciano – Teatro Stabile di Brescia CTB, the repertory theatre in Brescia, is putting on a new production of Barbablù by Georg Trakl directed by Cesare Lievi with the original scenes designed by Daniele Lievi to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of his death. Together with the new production an exhibition dedicated to the artist, who was also a leading stage and costume designer, will be held in Brescia. The sophisticated performance , which was shown for the first time at the theatre Biennale in 1984, was then successfully rivived in 1992 at the Festival di Cividate in Friuli in the double version Italian – German (Daniele Lievi, UBU prize posthumously awarded on this occasion). Barbablù is taken from a lyric originally conceived as a puppet performance by the Austrian poet Trakl, one of the most interesting poets who lived between the second part of the XIXth and the XXth century. A Visual Poem, it imposes itself for its elegant staging and the extraordinary interpretation of the spirit of the author. The play is rich in visionary elements. | Bluebeard in miniature. A visual poem made to measure for puppets.
(...) the dual proposal in German and Italian of a show almost “in miniature”, the enchanting Bluebeard that Cesare and Daniele Lievi, director and set designer/costume designer, took from a fragmented text, originally conceived as a show for puppets, by the Austrian poet Georg Trakl. In his short and unfortunate life, Trakl was obsessed with decay and death which he felt also, or above all, as "horizon" of love, and his interest in the legend of Bluebeard is not so surprising. When he wrote this dramatic tale, Trakl was 23 years old; at 27, in 1914, he died crushed by unhappiness and drugs. In the show the text leavens and breaks down into a kind of visual poem, a fluid mosaic of appearances that benefits from the “out of scale” poetics and the implicit cut into the puppet theater, to which it continually and subtly alludes, to combine, in a very unexpected and striking way, the infinite mortuary delicacy of nouveau art and the rigour that constitutes abstract art (as two famous names, Klimt and Mondrian).
More than just staging the terrible tale, the Lievis tell it like new with images, with the actors’ bodies made into images, or rather with the conflict between bodies and images to appear, to exist between the constraints of geometry in movement made of flowing black bulkheads, that open halfway, then close again, of mourning cruises, of steep guillotines. They, the images, have the primary function of speech; and Trakl’s words become sound images next to the throbbing soundtrack music. And all within a "box" that offers a scenic opening of two meters by two! The Lievis’ artistic adventure began with Bluebeard in 1984 (thanks to Franco Quadri, who proposed the show which was produced “privately” by the two authors, to the Venice Biennial). The show was revived last year, after Daniele’s death, in a production by the Burgtheater in Vienna, where in the meanwhile Cesare has become one of the most prestigious directors; and the German critics considered it the best show in 1991. His memory is dear to me, because I had long admired the work of both, and because I consider Cesare one of the most interesting directors of the last few years.
Giovanni Raboni |
