Enchantment & delight

A co-production of Teatro Stabile del Veneto – Teatro Nazionale and Compagnia Finzi Pasca, the piece has been authored by the company’s co-founder Daniele Finzi Pasca. In forty years of business, Finzi Pasca produced over forty shows, three Olympic ceremonies, two shows for Cirque du Soleil, and eight operas. Music, arrangement, and sound design by Maria Bonzanigo, scenes by Hugo Gargiulo and Matteo Verlicchi, costumes by Giovanna Buzzi, and a main cast comprising Alessandro Facciolo, Andrea Cerrato, Caterina Pio, Francesco Lanciotti, Gian Mattia Baldan, Giulia Scamarcia, Gloria Romanin, Leo Zappitelli, Luca Morrocchi, Micol Veglia, Rolando Tarquini. Titizé – A Venetian Dream is a show that will take us into a surreal universe. Staggered, allusive narration develops into a kaleidoscopic game of planes of meaning and hyperbolic grammelot. An international show for everyone, it blends tradition and innovation into a fascinating mix of clownery, body language, and acrobatics thanks to innovative mechanical equipment. Titizé is a piece of theatre of amazement and lightness that is able to forgo words entirely and an invitation to immerse yourself in the essence of Venice.

Your theatre.
I will call it ‘empathy theatre’. Forty years ago, we started working on this theme and studying the best ways and techniques to treat souls using stories. Over the years, we developed this form of theatre, a very personal style of creation and production. Clown shows invites interaction with the audience, meaning our actors, acrobats, musicians, dancers, and engineers are empathy specialists. I may also call it ‘artefact theatre’, because I just love stage machinery. Everybody knows that on stage, you don’t need reality. It just doesn’t look real. What we need on stage is artefacts, illusion, and allusion, and we are crazy about it! We love to use anything and everything that can generate illusion.

What we need on stage is artefacts, illusion, and allusion, and we are crazy about it! We love to use anything and everything that can generate illusion.

A new direction for theatre.
Being one of the few artists’ communities like it still around, we are a team that is very close-knit, like Pina Bausch’s company, for example. I have been working with Maria Bonzanigo for forty years, and the same goes for my brother Marco. We started out with clown shows, so a kind of theatre that is similar to Commedia dell’arte. The way we perform on stage is such that there is always some active connection with the audience, whether you see it or not.

A curious Venetian name for your show.
Titizé is Venetian for ‘you are’, and is an emblematic, rhythmic word that highlights the universality of an experience that involves a diverse audience of all ages. We found it interesting to build upon the verb ‘to be’ and to make it sound like an open question. My brother, Marco, came up with that. It works, it is easy to read for everyone, no matter where they come from, and we love knowing that it can work all around the world with no translation needed.

The essentials.
When you build a show upon text, it is obvious that narration will be its structure. In our show, though, as in others we made before, narration is rather an architecture of images that pile up on one another, much like in a dream. In dreams, there is constant going back and forth between imagination and dreamed real life. You jump from one scene to the next… to create such a narrative, there are all sorts of items to account for. You have acrobats that can stay on stage, change their costumes, and play the next act in a different time and space. It takes months to design: scenes, costumes, music… it’s like planning a banquet. In fact, we have been cooking for over four weeks now. We plan ahead and use everything we have.

Improvisation.
I’d rather say adaptation than improvisation. We constantly tweak our shows, in fact, we invite the same friends at the same shows at yearly intervals so they can see and hear what’s changed. There are multiple stages: debut first, then, some ten days later, some inevitable tweaking due to how the audience reacts. We may want to tweak something here and there. Lastly, after say three months, the show takes a life of its own. There’s a show of ours we have been doing for thirty-three years, and we keep changing a little something every time, hoping to get it perfectly right at least once.

Music and costumes.
Doing theatre means to be daring. I have been working with our costume designer, Giovanna Buzzi, since 2006, and we are going strong ever since. With Giovanna, we found a costume language, a style that allows us to give live to an undefined time, a time that is never quite recognizable in the present. With Hugo Gargiulo and Matteo Verlicchi, our scenographers, we try to find ways for amazement, and for creative solutions for changes of scenery. Naturally, it all grows to the large scale in large productions and in the world of opera, while in a theatre such as the Goldoni in Venice, there are constraints to compromise with to get the effect you want. Lighting is absolutely essential. I always start with lighting when I design my shows. I am a child of photographers, and our grandfather and great-grandfather were photographers, too, so you may say light is part of our heritage. In Titizé, we worked with a kind of projections and technologies that allow for truly amazing geometries. It is no chance that I left music last. Maria and I have been working together for forty years. There’s a kind of osmosis between us, we influence each other. Her music affects our shows deeply. For this show, she composed a score that is almost filmlike, and she mixed live performances with studio music.

We love the forestage, that middle earth, that jetty you walk on to observe. You can’t act while you’re on it.

A role for the audience.
We want some empathy with our audience. One of our most significant pieces, Icaro, which we still produce, is a show for an audience of one. At the time, the show left Guy Laliberté quite surprised. He then asked me to direct the Cirque du Soleil. There’s a kind of strange magic going on with Icaro: one actor meets one spectator every night and tells him a story while holding his hand. Arguably, before Parisian theatres were rebuild Italian-style, before the introduction of the curtains, there must have been some sort of black box that looked like what goes on when we dream, when we close our eyes. Inside it, inside that black box we have in our heads, or in our hearts, there’s enough light that lets you imagine things. Now suddenly, you switch the lights off, and from darkness come images that look for you. The forestage is the clowns’ turf, actors that interact with the audience. We love the forestage, that middle earth, that jetty you walk on to observe. You can’t act while you’re on it. There’s such a difference between an actor and a clown, for an actor plays a character, though nobody in the audience needs to know that’s for real. When you look at an actor, you know he’s not actually Hamlet, he’s just playing a part. With clowns, you can’t think they’re acting. Chaplin is an actor, Charlot is Charlot himself. When you step on the forestage, the audience believes you, but if just for a moment they think you’re acting, the magic is gone.

Your Olympic Games in Turin and Sochi.
Working in Turin felt like being home. It was a real party. I found myself working on something new altogether, a show tailor-made for a sports arena that was also going to be televised. Sochi was different. In Sochi, the goal was to create a monumental show. If it’s Austrians, Italians, Greeks hosting an Olympiad, what we want to convey is the human traits and the charm of a country. If it’s China, America, or Russia hosting, the physical dimension of the show is now essential. After our Russian experience, we went back to Icaro, a return to intimacy and simplicity: two beds, eighteen lamps, a sofa, and a chair.

Featured image: Titizé – A Venetian Dream, ph. Viviana Cangialosi