FOUR EXHIBITIONS FOR “LE MUSE”

Luchino Visconti’s costumes “The history of the Italian theatre, from the origins to the opera” in six cartoons by Orfeo Tamburi, Tommaso Le Pera’s stage pictures,“Le Muse. A theatre and its history”, Mole Vanvitelliana, October through December, during the Theatre Opening Season

The opening or re-opening of a theatre involves (or upsets) the whole community. On October 13^th 2002 the city of Ancona will open its renovated Teatro delle Muse that, far from being a mere Neoclassic building, will in fact become an important reference point for several activities related to stage arts. As a matter of fact, simultaneously with the shows of the opening season on stage at Le Muse, four exhibitions will take place in the suggestive area of the Eighteenth Century Mole Vanvitelliana (connected to the Theatre by the port quay ).

The common topic of all the exhibitions, that is dealt with from various viewpoints, is the theatre: the costumes of Luchino Visconti’s theatre and cinema characters (he filmed some scenes of Ossessione in Ancona); thirty years of theatre through Tommaso Le Pera’s pictures; a pictorial summary of the history of the Italian theatre till the opera by Orfeo Tamburi, from the Marche region; ancient finds and new signs of the theatre presented with the following title: “Le Muse, A theatre and its history”.

“We will use 20 large panels and 40 costumes by the historic Tirelli dress maker’s for the exhibition devoted to Luchino Visconti”, as much was stated by the Municipal Counsellor for Culture Antonio Luccarini. The intention is to convey the idea of the creative process and the magic of the aesthetic activity of  a Maestro. From a philological and political viewpoint, Visconti gave history a sense of deep impression on the reality through a theatrical or film scene that conveyed a thought, through emblematic images that have become actual symbols. For example the girl’s tutu in Bellissima and Maria Callas’ costume in Traviata, just like real icons, epitomise the total direction between the theatre and the cinema and express the sacredness through holy pictures placed in the space by the stage designer Giancarlo Basili and lit by the light designer Pepi Morgia (under the supervision of Caterina D’Amico, the Director of the Cinema Experimental Centre). A journey through suggestions presented as staging.

After all, a theatre that opens its doors after sixty years conveys the idea of the past and a sense of continuity, together with the nostalgia for what might have been but is not”.

Tommaso Le Pera’s pictures tell what the Italian theatre is all about.  In the year of the re-opening of Le Muse, the theatre photography had to be present.

Le Pera has photographed forty-thousand shows in his thirty-year activity. This is why he is one of the most important and sensitive Italian artists, who is well-known also abroad. He comes from a small village in Calabria; this is why he had to invent everything (techniques, secrets, tricks) while keeping Ugo Mulas as his model. He looks at the scene like a privileged spectator, a critic or a reviewer who seizes the soul of a show  through an image, who can transform the dynamics of a movement in two dimensions, who can fix the actor’s gestures and expressions while maintaining the memory of an art that is gone in the very moment in which it is created. “His action always has some Faustian features, ‘stop, you are beautiful!’ he says to the fleeting moment” – as much was written by Renato Nicolini.

Tommaso Le Pera is an on-the spot witness and many Italian actors devote a rehearsal of their shows to the releases of this quiet and patient person. He has walked and still walks along the (young and not so young) theatre paths to collect an endless variety of actions and artistic lives through a synthesis that sometimes tells the truth on the whole show. The exhibition will be a display of famous faces and a theatre that is already history.

Talking about history, in 1940 the young artist Orfeo Tamburi (born in Jesi, in the province Ancona) was asked to create six mosaic panels representing the “History of the Italian theatre, from the origins to the opera” for the entrance-hall of the Eur Theatre in Rome E 42. The war broke out and those panels were never started. But Tamburi worked and studied for more than one year to produce six cartoons to be used for the large marble mosaics. The sketches drawn on the panels will be included in the exhibition at Mole: the “Graeco-roman” theatre, the “religious theatre”, the “court or learned theatre”,  “commedia dell’arte”, the “pastoral theatre”, the  “melodrama”.

“I divided each panel – as Orfeo Tamburi wrote – into three parts: the central part is the most important one, dimension-wise; the remaining areas, i.e. the upper and lower areas, are separate and divided by a decorative band but they are part of the whole panel”.

Past and present unavoidably meet in this theatre that goes back to life. The exhibition  “Le Muse. A theatre and its history” goes over a long event, started in 1876, through prints of that time, librettos of operas, original posters, finds, decorations and gargoyles of the old building  that is given a new life and new signs thanks to the design of the architects Guerri and Salmoni and the fireproof curtain by the artist  Valeriano Trubbiani.  In addition to the renovation project, the curtain preparation drawings and a virtual reconstruction of how Teatro delle Muse could have been according to a philological study and  how it will be, will also be exhibited.