www.piccolamagnolia.it

CREATIONS 2017-18

Macbeth

Adagio Nureyev

1983 Butterfly

Zelda

Hamm-Let

Atridi

PICCOLA COMPAGNIA

DELLA MAGNOLIA

Since 2004, Piccola Compagnia della Magnolia has been doing a rigorous and

passionate investigation in between theatrical codes and research with a contem-

porary perspective of their own way of doing theatre, turning to the classic work or

experimenting with original writing, pursuing a synthesis between formal research

and emotional density, in an open and direct dialogue with the audience.

Magnolia is a “family run business” where all the activities - whether artistic, techni-

cal, organizational, administrative- are managed by a troupe having in common a

long-term project of life. Since the beginning the Company wanted to adopt an in-

ternational approach, performing its own works in Italy and abroad, acting in Italian

and in French, eventually subtitled.

Piccola Compagnia

della Magnolia

WWW.PICCOLAMAGNOLIA.IT

“Our research, which is long and

difficult but fascinating, seeks to

deny some cinematographic

approaches that do not belong

to the theatre, recovering what

it should have for convention:

the artificiality of a ritual moment

that is stranger to daily routine; a

different time, in which the audi-

ence and actors meet to search

for real in fiction".

Giorgia Cerruti

reviews - about us

BRUNO BIANCHINI - KLP

…between Baroque and Kabuki, in a stylistic code strongly oriented towards the

Oriental tradition, where Shakespeare meets Nekrosius.

MARIA DOLORES PESCE - DRAMMA.IT

... An intensive show, rich in suggestions and emotions that takes one to the bot-

tom due to the developing acting techniques of Giorgia Cerruti.

LA MARSEILLAISE - AVIGNON OFF

… A superb theatrical work of Giorgia Cerruti and a remarkable acting play of

Davide Giglio in the role of Hamlet.

EMILIO NIGRO - TAMBURO DI KATTRIN

…Grotowski with Nouvelle Vague contaminations. Artaud in a straight jacket, he

can express himself so freely. Giglio is a “party animal”. Shockwave. So dermal.

RENZO FRANCABANDERA - KLP

…Piccola Compagnia della Magnolia is already a well-established theatrical

group that finds its place between the most fecund and interesting companies

in North-West of Italy.

OSVALDO GUERRIERI - LA STAMPA

… Interpreted with a deep understanding by Davide Giglio, who is a bit of a fa-

ther and a bit of a clown, a bit an executioner and a bit a victim.

ALFONSO CIPOLLA - LA REPUBBLICA

… high calibre of acting ability; a rhythmical researchable to segment and har-

monize to tiny words and gestures; the absolute rigour never ending in itself; the

sensibility for tragedy transformed into grotesque; the essential scene that lives

thanks to actors and director’s touch.

WWW.PICCOLAMAGNOLIA.IT

CREATION 2018

MACBETH

From William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and

Heiner Müller’s Macbeth - After Shakespeare

Dramatic composition and direction Giorgia Cerruti

Scenography and lightsing design Lucio Diana

With Davide Giglio, Cleonice Fecit, Ersilia Lombardo, Fabrizia Gariglio

INTO MY MIND…

With this new work Piccola Compagnia della Magnolia carries on its research, manipulating

and digging into the classics. We go back to Shakespeare, who always lead us to discover

new boundaries into our scenic research, to move towards Muller’s post-modern ferocity.

Today Macbeth makes us face up to free will, necessary self-exploration and to recognize

that we are our choices. Macbeth lies in desires, in secrets and in ourselves, evident and im-

pelling as a material need, as eating or sleeping. He knocks at our minds.

We want to look at him closer through the actors-authors of our company. Through them

we’d like to cross an artwork which evokes reverence and terror, nevertheless believing

that blood – so present in Shakespeare’s play – is not the main hallmark. We believe imagi-

nation is the distinguishing feature of Macbeth.

Seemingly anachronistic sorcery becomes hallucinatory intensity in Macbeth’s mind. The

play is strictly connected with Macbeth’s dreadful daydreams, a gap in the reality.

Shakespeare forces us to be Macbeth, not a villain, but someone who suffers deeply be-

cause of his evil deeds. We all possess, to a greater or lesser degree, a prophetic imagina-

tion, but Macbeth’s imagination is absolute.

As many happy couples, he and Lady M. are madly in love, and they are far from being

enemies, but in the blink of an eye the best part of them vanishes. However, we are not in-

terested in guilt or moral problems. All we care about is the exuberance, the overabun-

dance of blood and energy, the supreme implications of every human being’s imagina-

tion, the universal negative sublime, the sectioned Passion in itself. Just like Ahab on the Pe-

quod, Macbeth is a world destroyer. As we keep reading, this work consumes us: it’s the

time that triggers this feeling, an elapsing time that we all perceive.

The distinction between death, time and nature seems to be something inextricable. That is

what anguish the contemporary man. And we identify with Macbeth because we have the

same impression of violating our nature everyday.

The amazing power of this work comes from its extreme internalization: Macbeth is Shake-

speare’s most internalized drama. This is the feeling that accompanies our struggle: to en-

act our Macbeth and to extract from the drama the same emotional density and formal

accuracy we are always aiming for.

CREATION 2017

ADAGIO NUREYEV PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

Bio_Graphies Project - third creation

The work is played in Italian. English or French subtitles available.

Sources of inspiration Nijinsky’s diaries, Nureyev’s interviews and

confessions, biographies, articles on Nureyev, Byron’s Manfred.

Dramatic composition and direction Giorgia Cerruti

With Davide Giglio, accompanied by Giorgia Cerruti

In collaboration with Sala Ichos (Napoli)and Residenza Dracma

(Polistena)

Da With this work we are in presence of the corporeal dimension of being an artist: the ef-

fort enclosed in every single limb, in the heart and in the brain of a poet of any art contains

the assertion of art and the revenge against death. A bit like sex - would say Nureyev - inter-

viewed on one of his numerous - and so briefly inhabited - Arabian couches.

Rudy… Terrified by the fear of dying without having tried everything possible; Rudy, ready at

the bar every morning at eight o'clock, an hour before everyone, constantly obsessed with

the minute study of the craft, able to sudden dropouts to unbridled passion during the

night, uninhibited, provocative, almost another person... The music in the night which be-

trays the day... But at eight o'clock in the morning Rudy puts on his dance shoes. Rudy, who

furnishes his houses around the world, surrounded by colleagues and acquaintances but

basically alone. Rudy, who feels good only in Li Galli, the island where he hopes to die…

Andy Warhol’s friends, Jaqueline Kennedy, Mick Jagger… Rudy, transgressive - when this

word was still synonymous with creative – Rudy,who bites the dancers if they hinder his pas-

sage; Rudy, the sexiest man of the last century, majestic, dark, chaotic; Rudy, who is not al-

lowed to rest; Rudy, who didn’t grant rest ... vainain, frenetic, monstrous …

“Adagio Nureyev tries to cross poetically

the existence of the great Russian dancer

to open a window on the Art in the

broadest sense: the artist's vocation, the

technical issues and the feelings, the lone-

liness and the insecurity that the work on

the stage involves, the sense of the sub-

lime that art gives people in everyday life,

the unknown forces that drive the artists,

the political need to defend the poetic.

Adagio Nureyev is a song of uncondi-

tional love for the grace and the mystery

of Art.”

Giorgia Cerruti

CREATION 2016

1983 BUTTERFLY

Bio_Graphies Project - second creation

The work is played in Italian. English or French subtitles available.

Created by Piccola Compagnia della Magnolia

Coproduced by Festival delle Colline Torinesi

Dramaturgy Giorgia Cerruti

with the valuable cooperation of Bernard Boursicot

Direction Giorgia Cerruti

With Davide Giglio and Giorgia Cerruti

Assistant director Cleonice Fecit

Lights, video Lucio Diana

Scenography Renato Ostorero, Lucio Diana

Costumes Atelier Pcm, Gaia Paciello, sartoria Donato

Wigs Mario Audello

1983 Butterfly debuted on June 17th, 2016 at Festival delle Colline

Torinesi. Bernard Boursicot was there.

Promo 1983 Butterfly

With 1983 BUTTERFLY began a journey that took us to cross real lives and imaginary destinies,

linked by a deep, endless desire. 1983 BUTTERFLY is a “French-Chinese” journey, a trip in-

spired by the adventure of Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu, two real people, one of whom

is still alive and collaborated with us on the creation of this work by sharing memories of his

past. The story, that interweaves love, politics, espionage, and sexual identity - joining at

times with Puccini’s opera – and spannes 20 years of history between East and West, up to

the scandalous trial of 1983; a trial that has shocked the world, revealing the incredible

story of a man who “ loved a woman created by a man”.

“It was not the Puccini’s opera to intrigue

us, but the incompleteness and the am-

biguous ingenuity of the human story of

this couple, a story that we have tried to

isolate than the spatial and temporal lim-

its. 1983 BUTTERFLY marks an important

new phase in the artistic life of the Com-

pany: now we want to talk about the de-

sire, so pure, because it is what makes us

alive.”

Giorgia Cerruti

a man

who loved

a woman

created by

a man

CREATION 2014/15

ZELDA LIFE AND DEATH OF ZELDA FITZGERALD Bio_Graphies Project - First creation

The work is played in Italian or in French. English subtitles available.

Dramaturgy Giorgia Cerruti

Direction Davide Giglio and Giorgia Cerruti

With Giorgia Cerruti

Promo Zelda

Eccentric and versatile artist, wife of the writer Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Author in 1932 of the

wonderful auto-biographical novel "Save me the Waltz". She died at the age of forty-eight

in obscure circumstances during a fire in the psychiatric hospital where she was hospitalized

because of her mental instability due to a severe form of schizophrenia. A woman with un-

conventional attitudes considered a proto-feminist.

Zelda and Fitzgerald, joined by a heartbreaking and devastating love story, were icons of

the new age of jazz in America and later became in the 20's a model in Europe, a country

crossed by the couple during the long and exhausting committals of Zelda.

We reiterate the words of Zelda, in her bed, alone and recovering because of a congestion

of ideas in a dark psychiatric hospital in America, waiting for death eight years after Scott’s

death. From under the sheets Zelda extracts some objects like soul resurgence symbols of

her lifetime: a love token by Scott, letters, newspapers, photographs.

Like Beckett’s Winnie, Zelda survives in an atoll of life debris, tenaciously dusted to chase the

shadow of a hypothetical happiness: both metaphors for a world which has given birth and

which now swallows it. It doesn’t matter that the world is a mirror of the banal or of the sub-

lime of everyday: one shiver of happiness, whatever it is, that is the entire span of existence.

With this work Piccola Compagnia della Magnolia deepens its theater research in the syn-

thesis between formal research and emotional density, entrusting to the emblematic figure

of Zelda the inexhaustible metaphor of the sublime research. An intimate work, poetic and

alive, wrapped in a nauseating smell of pink roses.

"I don’t want you to

see me growing old

and ugly. It wold be

better for both of us

to die just turned

thirty.”

Zelda Fitzgerald

CREATION 2014

ATRIDI METAMORPHOSIS OF A RITE

The work is played in Italian. English or French subtitles available.

A Coproduction with Festival Printemps d’Europe, Lyon and Festival

Benevento Città Spettacolo

Sourcces: Hofmannsthal, Yourcenar, Eschilo, Maraini, Manfridi, Sar-

tre, Pasolini

Dramaturgy and direction Giorgia Cerruti

With Davide Giglio, Giorgia Cerruti, Camilla Sandri,

Ksenija Martonivic, Matteo Rocchi

Sound Carlo Girardi

Lights Riccardo Polignieri

Costume and set design Atelier Pcm - Gaia Paciello

Supported by Città di Torino, Provincia di Torino and

Sistema Teatro Torino e Provincia

In collaboration with Circuito Piemonte dal Vivo and

Alliance Française.

Promo Atridi

“When you enter in a family or a clan as a

stranger, you always feel a jumble of olden,

things not said, passed, noisy silences: that’s

how we have passed through the Atridi’s fam-

ily: as intruders, who could have never suc-

ceeded to deeply feel the big mass of life,

past, love, suffering that brought them to-

gether; just that too elusive fascinated us and

so we are giving it back to you.”

Giorgia Cerruti

Piccola Compagnia della Magnolia brings back the theatre to its ritualistic nature, explor-

ing the Agamemnon’s myth with a contemporary vision.

Atridi is a history of love, as big as humanity. The show is an investigation about the mortal-

ity of love. Crossing through the fundamental issues of the painful story of Atreus: the Iphi-

genia’s sacrifice, the Agamemnon’s murder by Clytemnestra, the burning hate of Electra

and Oreste’s desire for revenge. We wanted to illuminate the story of family relationships in

the exact moment of degeneration, collapse, turning the power of love into uncontrolled

passion. Atreus questions the boundary which separates Eros from his blood ties. It seems

that the events happened to Atreus might reveal the drama of all, with a vital heartbeat

which evokes the personal and common conscience. We chose to immerse this story into

a sharp and suspended atmosphere, in a short circuit of languages and times.

Intensifying a personal theatrical research on un-naturalism, Magnolia continues the ethic

and aesthetic investigation on the truth in fiction. Declaring heavy theatricality in order to

convey a sense through the emotion.

CREATION 2009

HAMM-LET Study on Voracity

Trilogy of individual - First creation

The work is played in Italian. English or French subtitles available.

Created by Piccola Compagnia della Magnolia

Coproduced by Théâtre Durance / Scène Conventionnée and Corte

Ospitale di Rubiera

Supported by Sistema Teatro Torino e Provincia

Dramatic elaboration based on Hamlet by Shakespeare

with contributions from Muller, Larforgue, Pasi, Moscato

Dramatic composition and direction Giorgia Cerruti

With Davide Giglio, Federica Carra, Giorgia Cerruti

Music by Nyman, Armstrong, Morin, Transiberian Orchestra, Portishe-

ad, Pavone, Martini

Sound effects G.u.p.

Lights design Riccardo Polignieri

Scenography and costumes Claudia Martore and Alessandro Di Bla-

si - Atelier PCM

Graphics Fabio Sgorlon / Pictures and video Alessandro Mattiolo

. Promo Hamm-Let

"Between good and evil, there must be a

watershed, perhaps even a wall. But

when the wall is besieged from side to side

by an indistinguishable tidal, when nothing

is clear in ideas, when blind pressure is too

strong, the wall and the moral break

down: only something that we are obliged

to call aesthetic survives. An obscure

knowledge of primary perceptions con-

cerning life and death, the stubborn hope

of tearing forms from formless. This feeling is

maybe the only glimmer of hope that can

illuminate our recent history, making it un-

derstandable." Heiner Müller

Starting from the inexhaustible masterpiece by Shakespeare and going through Muller’s

cruel language, Hamm-Let / Study on Voracity tells about Hamlet-Gertrude-Ophelia, three

characters that cancel each other because of love, eliminating their double, the arduous

part of themselves that infected the other and now is turning against the protagonists like

an infernal machine, devouring the relationships between a mother and a son and be-

tween two lovers. Hamlet as a Man, and the feeling of Love when it oscillates between pul-

sations of love and defect of possession. Behind the revenge tragedy, the research on

Hamlet revealed an unsolved issue in Hamlet's soul towards the Woman, magnified by him,

so as to become a puppet, and immediately denied up to the point of causing her death .

Only in this way Hamlet "digests" the woman and can at last die as an intellectual, giving

voice and a name to the silence that covers him. Hamm-Let/Study on Voracity is a play

about Love when Love is kind, ruthless, voracious, when it is in its early stage and seems to

last forever, but then a betrayal denies its existence; when Love becomes wild and incestu-

ous lust, when you can laugh for love and feel immortal; when Hamlet is the fruit of a

Woman and by her he is devoured, when we should never speak of love as words betray,

and the intellect crystallizes our human sentiment in an inevitable way.

Piccola Compagnia della Magnolia

Direction Giorgia Cerruti

Supported by

Regione Piemonte - L.R. 68 – art.6

Legal headquarter Via Cenischia 50/7,

10139 Torino, Italy

Operational headquarter Teatro Fassino,

Via IV Novembre 19, Avigliana(To)

C.F. e P.IVA 08857980018

CONTACT US

www.piccolamagnolia.it

+39 011 0446158 – +39 348 8442070

Organization

Alessandra Di Tommaso

+39 3450968658

info@piccolamagnolia.it

Distribution in Italy and abroad

Giulia Randone

Mob. +39 333 1054547

pcmteatro@gmail.com

Distribution in France

Christian Le Blanc

Mob. +33 662 486 598

christianleblanc86@gmail.com