HISTOIRE DU SOLDAT
—
by
Igor Stravinsky e Charles Ramuz
—
direction and choreography by
Lara Guidetti
«to Buy to sell, and with death everything .. stops ..all? Nothing. Everything and then nothing.
Everything is like nothing..»
Charles Ramuz
CAST &
CREDITS
with Valter Malosti
and with Giuseppe Brancaccio, Sofia Casprini, Luciano Nuzzolese, Martina Monaco, Saverio Bari, Tony Contartese
assistance to the direction Carla Cafiero with the collaboration of Federica Bastoni
assistance to the choreography Martina Monaco
musical assistance Angelo Colletti
costumes by Maddalena Oriani
scenography by Cecilia Sacchi
light design by Marcello Marchi
sound design by Marcello Gori
Managing by Fabio Ferretti
with the contribution of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities – Entertainment Sector
Synopsis
IDENTITY 2.0
Histoire du soldat, written by Stravinsky in 1918 while he was in exile in Switzerland after the October Revolution , is the only work that the composer has in an original and unprecedented form.
Today, almost a hundred years later, Sanpapié explores this very rich subject in search of the universality of his message, to bring to light the lucid dream of a humanity that has lost her most authentic self and is dragged adrift by impulses of greed and vanity. Among the less performed works by the Russian composer, L’Histoire du Soldat is a Faustian fable of bewilderment and attempts at redemption, and of illusion, love, death. Music is an architecture of perfect of fragments, of rhythmic and musical cells whose origins transcend time and space: from Bach choirs to the waltz, from echoes of folklore music to the “new” suggestions of tango and ragtime. The words, by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, are a rhythmic and poetic counterpoint, also characterized by multiple registers, that between pauses and sudden accelerations, leads to the inevitable finale.
IDENTITY 3.0
The Stresa Festival commission becomes an opportunity for Lara Guidetti to tackle the matter of Histoire with an analytical spirit, to allow the elements that compose it to express themselves in their purity.
The broken, inwardly fragmented condition of the Soldier, who renounces his true soul for pursuing wealth inspires another division: that one between body and voice, dance and word. The Soldier and the Devil speak and move on stage in constant dialogue with their dancing “doubles”, the very modern idea of a deeply divided humanity appears, one that doesn’t recognise itself and is unable to re-appropriate any profound sense of belonging.
The choreographic research takes up the variety of references of the musical composition, combining different visual and physical planes, and bringing out the plurality of visions that the work offers within a symbolic dimension. Like a cubist painting, dance manifests multiple points of view, creating communication between a formal research focused on the “classicism” of the movement and a rigorous but also liquid and decomposed gesture, without sacrificing irony and mimic and theatrical play, in an attempt to really bring to life all possible influences and different levels of understanding the work.
The scenes, clearly inspired by “metaphysics”, and the costumes, which echo Malevich and the Russian supremacism, complete a staging in which abstraction and form interact with a narrative material of great human tension, in a continuous cross-reference between high and low, concrete and abstract, cultured and popular. The Narrator, played by Valter Malosti, is pure vocality, and he speaks Ramuz’s words like in a German cabaret, at times in a persuasive, sarcastic and lashing way. The word, mixed with the music and the sound environments that punctuate the narration, becomes pure sound. Sometimes it becomes living, pulsating matter, when the action mounts in the different encounters / clashes between the soldier and the devil, sometimes it becomes a hiss lost in the fog when the text plumbs into existential depths and brings the viewer to face the vanity of what too often in life is pursued too much.
