"Sonetto" a Shakespearean disguise (1996)

AUTHORS

Edoardo Sanguineti, Andrea Liberovici

DIRECTION

Andrea Liberovici

MUSIC

Andrea Liberovici

CAST

Ottavia Fusco
Andrea Liberovici
Patrizia Schiavo
Richard Coroneo
Vittorio Gassman (voce fuoricampo)

SCENES

laboratorio del "E. A. Carlo Felice", Genova

COSTUMES

Clara Longobardo

LIGHTING

Pippo Ghisoli

PRODUCER

E. A. Carlo Felice

SYNOPSIS

"Sonetto" a Shakespearean disguise

I'm satisfied of the result of "Rap". I have gladly collaborated to prepare the verbal materials for "Sonetto", which can be considered an ulterior moment of search in that first experiment with Liberovici. It's just to test new possibility in the combination between words and song, music and gesture, with at the same time references both to the cultured and popular, and concert and consumer traditions. I like to draw this show as "disguise", which is a category beloved to me, among the possibilities that the theatre particularly offers. This time we leaved arbitrarily from some Shakespeare's sonnets, which have been devolved to the scene and mixed with others verses of mine, sonnets and not sonnets.

Edoardo Sanguineti

Direction notes and notes on notes

A poet as Sanguineti who provides me with drawn and inspired material by a poet as Shakespeare, I didn't have, happily, any way out. It has been just deleted every melodramatic, or just melodic temptation, and followed the word, nothing else. I've leaved from imagining Shakespeare's head like a head probably very crowd, therefore full of voices, and since the Sonnets (which are the main source of this show) are the only work without disguise, but nearly a loving diary of the poet, the voices are, in the score and in the theatrical fiction, those of the poet. I talk about plural voices because the loved objects by Shakespeare in these sonnets are two: a mysterious young man (it is presumed he is noble) about whom it's known only the initials W. H., and an unknown dark lady. I have thought to distribute this sort of inner monolog, therefore one and double (without to establish psychologies or hierarchies between the sexes and lovers), into two protagonist's voices, one feminine and one male.
The show will be therefore a free story in music (realized mostly by the musicality of the word), of a poetic gestation. As Ghezzi says: "When we speak we all make a fast editing", and I've tried to imagine, in a theatrical and musical way (never as today the new equipment of musical computer science gives the feeling of composing and montage), the inside of a mind. It's a creative head, which is invaded by words, and which translates opposite feelings, for example, of violence and contrast, or hate and love, into poetry. A sort of continuous work in progress, among attempts, intrusions, segments of sense, and so on; which are typical distractions of the brilliant poetry by Sanguineti, and also of this sort of acting-singing, which we have begun to experiment with the show, "Rap". This mind rich of presences and voices, of broken and resumed sonnets, full of books, pens, inkpots, confessionals, men, women, tombstones, typewriter, and so on, will exit from itself in order to watch itself, at the end of the show. If the mind of the creator-poet is like a dramatic game, than the one of Shakespeare's character, with its voice-off which declaims the final sonnet, could be anything else but the mind of a great actor.
Vittorio Gassman has recorded for us a beautiful version of sonnet N° 2, which is obviously translated by Sanguineti, and which will close this show. On the stage, as in "Rap", there is with me Ottavia Fusco, actress-singer with whom I have the fortune to collaborate and to share the idea of a new chamber music theatre.
Writing notes on notes is always difficult for me. As I said before, the new musical instruments so as some programs of musical computer science, has allowed me, after having written them, to compose and to decompose, notes, music, sounds, noises an so on, of every type, following the free suggestions of this text-disguised mind, which covers ages, and therefore kinds, stamps, musical instruments, very different among them, making to act the unavoidable crashes and encounters to the word.

Andrea Liberovici

copyright © 2004