An imaginative journey that investigates the creative possibilities of staging for opera and prose, in order to make the visitor-spectator participate in the craft and design work that distinguishes the art show, from the creative act of planning to the study of scenic potential until the natural completion of the final staging.
From April 16 to June 15, 2014, the halls of the House of Theaters of Villa Pamphilj thus they become a symbolic and original container of ideas and materials conceived and elaborated by the students of the Theater Design course of the POLI.design in Milan, coordinated by Prof. Christian Silva, and of the Scenography course of the Faculty of Architecture of the "Sapienza ” University of Rome, held by Prof. Massimo Zammerini.
With an original and innovative approach to the theatrical world, each student has given life, thanks to his own personal research into the universe of opera and his own artistic sensibility, to the interpretation of the character of a character, creating his costume or designing the space for a staging, starting from the study of the text, the libretto and the architectural configurations of famous theatres, such as La Scala and the Rome Opera.
A large architectural model, scenographic projects, installations, graphic tables, sketches, paper patterns, theatrical costumes, offer an experience of knowledge and involvement in the arts and crafts of the scene.
You "enter" the exhibition by crossing a small building inspired by the "Teatro del Mondo" by the architect Aldo Rossi, a prismatic object that can host performances of various kinds and nature, thus marking the incipit of a path that is configured as a continuum of the room in the room. The light, itinerant and easily modular structure of the exhibition dialogues with the halls of the Casa, reaffirming the ability of scenic art to create narratives and dreams even outside the canonical places or sacred temples of entertainment. As he recounts his idea of theater in his autobiography Aldo Rossi: «They were also simple, provisional structures; the time of a midsummer love, of a feverish and uncertain season, the provisional theater (…). It was really a little theater where the story took place within life but where the theatrical story, summer, from vacation time, marked life»; in the same way we focus on the concept of theatrical space as a social and architectural place.
In the first two rooms, in an installation that is also a scenography, the graphic tables are displayed which bring together the design ideas of the two different working groups. The study works come from the greatest classical tradition: from Don Carlo to Giuseppe Verdi's Macbeth, inspired by the homonymous plays by Friedrich Schiller and William Shakespeare, up to Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.
From sketches and scenographic projects, positioned on discontinuous and jagged elementary structures, we move on to the "behind the scenes" tailoring, rich paper models, sketches and fabrics that offers the visitor the opportunity to touch the materials usually used on stage. The itinerary ends with the costumes of Verdi's characters, Iago and Desdemona from Othello, Attila from the homonymous Attila, Amneris from Aida, Abigaille from Nabucco, Gilda from Rigoletto, Leonora and Azucena from Il Trovatore, Violetta from La Traviata and Lady Macbeth from Macbeth, all made with fabrics and trimmings that lead back to the imaginary of the initial room.
