Institute of Theatre and Opera – Page 3

Exhibition “La scena magica. L’arte teatrale di Mischa Scandella”

In the final year of the National Committee for the celebrations of the centenary of Mischa Scandella’s birth (1921–2021), the Institute of Theatre and Opera, as its promoting body, proposes an exhibition itinerary along which to retrace the Venetian set designer’s artistic career, showing the public the beauty and extraordinary wealth of the artist’s personal archive, donated to the Institute by his son Giovanni.

The exhibition, curated by Maria Ida Biggi, Nicola Bruschi and Lorenzo Cutuli, will be housed in the Magazzino del Sale No. 3 at the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, and will allow the public to get closer to the work of Mischa Scandella, who – having trained in the cultural fervour of post-war Venice – made his debut in the world of university theatres in Venice and Padua, before going on to establish himself on a national level. Over the course of his long career, Scandella worked alongside the great names in Italian theatre, including Gianfranco de Bosio, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Vittorio Gassman, Giovanni Poli, Guido Salvini and Giorgio Strehler.

This major initiative follows the publication of the book name by Maria Ida Biggi, La scena magica di Mischa Scandella, published by Silvana editoriale, Milan 2022.

Stories of Creative Women in the Twentieth Century from Russia to Europe

The Institute of Theatre and Opera hosts two meetings in the cycle Stories of Creative Women in the Twentieth Century from Russia to Europe organised by Ca’ Foscari University in collaboration with the LEI (Leadership, Energy, Entrepreneurship) project. The initiative, divided into nine thematic encounters, is dedicated to an in-depth biographical and artistic investigation of emblematic female characters from the twentieth century. Retracing their narratives will allow us to reflect on the overcoming of both identitary and national boundaries.

International Conference Architecture and Stage Design for Minor Theatres, 1750-1850

The Institute of Theatre and Opera, in collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences in Bern and Lausanne, is holding an international conference on the themes of architecture and stage space and design for minor theatres in Italy and Europe between 1750 and 1850. The event is part of Raphael Bortolotti’s PhD project: “Italian Stage Design in the 19th Century” and is the second conference, following one held in October 2021 in Feltre, entitled “Practices of Provincial Theatres in the Risorgimento: Management, Stage, Music, Audience and Repertoire”.

During the transdisciplinary conference, scholars from various fields will explore not only theatrical space and stage design in minor and provincial theatres but also treatises in this architectural field, which at the time was so important that it generated a conspicuous production of essays, scholarly treatises and theoretical projects, as well as numerous competitions related to the theme and the built results.

In addition, again in an interdisciplinary approach, the history of individual theatres will be analysed through in-depth studies and their socio-historical role in the 18th and 19th centuries reassessed. The advisory committee is composed of Maria Ida Biggi (Fondazione Giorgio Cini Institute of Theatre and Opera; Ca’ Foscari University, Venice), Raphael Bortolotti and Annette Kappeler (University of Applied Sciences, Bern).

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Study Day Gianfranco Folena at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini

With this event the Fondazione Giorgio Cini secretary general and the Institute of Theatre and Opera wish to commemorate Gianfranco Folena, director of the Institute of Literature Music and Theatre from 1959 to 1992, on the thirtieth anniversary of his death. Organised in conjunction with the Gianfranco Folena National Committee, the study day will revisit the many innovative proposals put forward by Folena during his long directorship, when he made the Institute a cultural hothouse for research and discussion among the leading intellectuals of the day. The aim of the event is to highlight Folena’s wide-ranging cultural production, which, with its innovative and pioneering proposals on the Italian cultural scene, contributed to creating new areas of research in fields such as musicology, where he promoted libretto studies. Moreover, the creation of new content and the dissemination of the results led to innovative areas of research that later provided the guidelines for the Institute’s academic inquiries.

The participants include Daniela Goldin Folena (University of Padua), Gianfranco’s son Pietro Folena, Piero Del Negro (University of Padua), and Maria Ida Biggi (Ca’ Foscari University, Venice and director of the Institute of Theatre and Opera).

International Conference Goldoni Avant la Lettre: Evolution, Involution, and Transformation of Theatrical Genres (1650-1750)

The Institute of Theatre and Opera, in collaboration with the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, has organised an international conference on changes in theatrical genres between 1650 and 1750. The event is part of the research activities of the Archivio del Teatro Pregoldoniano (ArpreGo), which has selected Italian plays between 1650 and 1750 with characteristics that may have influenced Carlo Goldoni’s reformed theatre in terms of all his highly varied historical and artistic production. This project has also led to a significant number of editions of period plays with links to Goldoni’s production and to the creation of several databases which, together with the texts of the plays, can be freely consulted on the project’s official website (www.usc.gal/goldoni).

The conference will be an opportunity for scholars in the field to meet and discuss the subject and, in particular, dramaturgical developments that influenced Goldoni’s formative process. In addition to the organisers of the event, Maria Ida Biggi (Institute of Theatre and Opera, Fondazione Giorgio Cini; Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice), Javier Gutiérrez Carou (Universidade Santiago de Compostela) and Piermario Vescovo (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice), the members of the Advisory Committee include Beatrice Alfonzetti (Università La Sapienza, Rome), Camilla Cederna and Lucie Comparini (Université Paris-Sorbonne), Francesco Cotticelli (Università di Napoli), Emanuele De Luca and Andrea Fabiano (Université Paris-Sorbonne), Paologiovanni Maione (Conservatorio di Napoli), Marzia Pieri (Università di Siena) and Anna Scannapieco (Università di Padova).

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International Conference Il Teatro delle riviste (1870-2000). Periodicals as objects and tools of theatrical historiography

This conference represents the culmination of the work conducted over the past ten years by the Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire sur les Revues de Théâtre (GRIRT), and is organized in synergy with the Institute for Theatre and Melodrama of the Giorgio Cini Foundation of Venice and the program Theatre and Photography in France and Europe
in the 19th and 20th Centuries of the Institut Universitaire de France. The goal of the meeting is to deepen the studies on the journals of the field, valuable documentary sources for theatrical historiography. The focus of the conference is on the period from the 1870s-1880s to the to the last years of the 20th century with the emergence of new digital media.

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Comitato organizzativo
Maria Ida Biggi (Istituto per il Teatro e il Melodramma, Fondazione Giorgio Cini; Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia); Marianna Zannoni (Istituto per il Teatro e il Melodramma, Fondazione Giorgio Cini; Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia); Sophie Lucet (Université de Paris); Marco Consolini (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle); Romain Piana (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle); Arnaud Rykner (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)

Comitato scientifico
Paul Aron (Université Libre de Bruxelles); Marion Denizot (Université Rennes 2); Mathieu Duplay (Université de Paris); Mark Evans (Coventry University); Roberta Gandolfi (Università degli Studi di Parma); Gerardo Guccini (Università degli Studi di Bologna); Jan Lazardzig (Freie Universität Berlin); Lorenzo Mango (Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale); Evanghelia Stead (Université Paris-Saclay); Armelle Talbot (Université de Paris); Piermario Vescovo (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia); Jean-Claude Yon (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes)

The Teatre of Paolo Poli

Paolo Poli returns to the Teatro Gerolamo, Milan, sixty years after his debut. But this time in the form of an exhibition of images and materials from his personal archives, now in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini Institute for Theatre and Opera. Entitled, The theatre of Paolo Poli: from the actor’s personal archive to the documents in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, the exhibition will mark the sixtieth anniversary of his debut as the lead actor and director of Il Novellino, staged in late 1960 in the Milanese theatre in Piazza Beccaria.

7 – 22 November 2021
Milan, Teatro San Gerolamo

Books at San Giorgio

The presentations of new books published by or associated with the Fondazione Giorgio Cini resumes on 14 September with Lo specchio del gusto. Vittorio Cini e il collezionismo d’arte antica nel Novecento, edited by Luca Massimo Barbero and published by Marsilio. The book contains the proceedings from a conference held on San Giorgio in 2017, devoted to Vittorio Cini as a highly refined patron of the arts and historic art collecting in the 20th century.

On 15 October, the featured book will be “Forse tu sola hai compreso”. Lettere di Eleonora Duse a Emma Lodomez Garzes, edited by Marianna Zannoni and published by Marsilio. The book consists of 350 letters from the great diva to her friend Emma Lodomez Garzes. Previously unpublished, this correspondence arrived in the Fondazione Cini in 1977 and is now in the Duse Archive in the Institute of Theatre and Opera.

On the third date, 27 October, there will also be a concert at the Squero Auditorium to accompany the presentation of „Wechsel der Töne“: Musikalische Elemente in Friedrich Hölderlins Dichtung und ihre Rezeption bei den Komponisten, edited by Gianmario Borio and Elena Polledri and published in Heidelberg by Winter in 2019. The book brings together the results of a multi-year project carried out at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the relationship between Hölderlin’s poetry and its musical reception by 20th-century composers.

On the third date, 4 November, the seventh volume in the “Musical Cultures of the Twentieth Century” series will be presented: The Female Voice in The Twentieth Century: Material, Symbolic and Aesthetic Dimensions, edited by Serena Facci and Michela Garda and published by Routledge. This book is the result of a research project whose aim is to offer theoretical perspectives on the voice developed from the analysis of cases in various contexts of vocal practices: opera, experimental
composition, performance art, jazz, popular music and folk revival.

Lastly, on 3 December, the featured book is a volume in the series entitled “The Critical Edition of the Operas of Antonio Vivaldi”: Il Teuzzone in a critical edition by Alessandro Borin and Antonio Moccia, published by Ricordi. The collected edition of operas by Antonio Vivaldi thus gains a new volume that brings to completion the diptych written by the “Red Priest” for Mantua. Premiered during the last days of 1718, the opera preceded by a few months the production of Tito Manlio, RV 738.

Lyda Borelli – film and stage actress

On 1 April 2021, at 6.30 pm, the Moscow State Central Film Museum, the Italian Cultural Institute in Moscow and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini Institute of Theatre and Opera will unveil the international project Lyda Borelli – film and stage actress.

On 31 March 2021, the Moscow State Central Film Museum will celebrate its anniversary, which, however, this year falls on a Wednesday, the museum’s weekly closure day. The following day, therefore, 1 April, will see the official opening of the exhibition Lyda Borelli – film and stage actress, curated by Maria Ida Biggi and Marianna Zannoni, and held in collaboration with the Fondazione Giorgio Cini Institute of Theatre and Opera and the Moscow Italian Cultural Institute.

The exhibition tells the story of the artistic career of one of the most fascinating Italian actresses of the early 20th century. The specialists from Institute of Theatre and Opera, with the support of Lyda Borelli’s descendants, continue to study and preserve the diva’s legacy. This exhibition is the result of a long research process that led to the publication of the monograph Il Teatro di Lyda Borelli, edited by Maria Ida Biggi and Marianna Zannoni (Fratelli Alinari, Florence, 2017). The materials for the exhibition were provided by various Italian institutions: museums, theatres, libraries and archives.

Lyda Borelli was born into a family of actors in 1887 and began acting on stage as a child. She belongs to the generation immediately after the great Eleonora Duse. At various times in her career Lyda was a member of the companies of directors Ruggero Ruggeri and Ermete Novelli, and performed in theatres in various Italian cities. Borelli starred in plays by leading modernist playwrights, such as Gabriele D’Annunzio and Oscar Wilde, as well as in films (she has a filmography of around fifteen films from 1913-1918). Her circle of friends included the most brilliant Italian authors and intellectuals of the first quarter of the 20th century, and she was portrayed by leading period photographers.

Lyda Borelli had a busy long life both on and off stage. After her marriage to Count Vittorio Cini in 1918, she retired from theatre and films to devote herself entirely to her husband and children.

The Lyda Borelli – film and stage actress exhibition is the result of renewed collaboration between the Moscow State Central Film Museum and the Italian Cultural Institute in Moscow, begun a year ago during the preparations for an exhibition celebrating the birth centenary of Federico Fellini.

The exhibition will be presented by Larisa Solonitsyna, Director of the State Central Film Museum, and Daniela Rizzi, Director of the Moscow Italian Cultural Institute. Maria Ida Biggi, Director of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini Institute of Theatre and Opera, will send video greetings.

The presentation will end with the film La memoria dell’altro (also known as The Memory of Another) starring Borelli and restored by the Cineteca Nazionale, Rome. The film will be screened with the musical accompaniment of pianist Philip Cheltsov.

Along the paths of the ancient garden. Dante in the Borges Labyrinth

To mark the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, the Institute of Theatre and Opera is staging a reading of some significant excerpts from Jorge Luis Borges’s Nine Dantesque Essays in the inspiring setting of the Labyrinth that the Fondazione Giorgio Cini named after the Argentine writer. Directed by the actress and drama teacher Paola Bigatto, who co-wrote the script with Meredith Airò Farulla, the reading will feature some second-year students from the Accademia Teatrale Carlo Goldoni in Venice (the school of the Teatro Stabile del Veneto), who will also have the chance to recite some cantos from the Divine Comedy.

Along the paths of the ancient garden. Dante in the Borges Labyrinth was born as an exercise by the second year students of the Carlo Goldoni Theater Academy, and was conceived as a traveling show in the spaces of the Giorgio Cini Foundation. Due to the restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic it was never made with the public in attendance. It has been decided to leave testimony of the formative path and the dramaturgical work through the realization of this video.

Drama students taking part in the event:

Antonio Giuseppe Bia

Daniele Boccardi

Lisa Boni

Giada Capecchi

Stella Capelli

Francesco Lunardi

Cristiano Moioli

Susanna Re

Ottavia Sanfilippo

Chiara Trevisi

Sara Verteramo

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