I Cenci

The Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana and LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, together with Festival Aperto/Fondazione I Teatri di Reggio Emilia and the Venice Biennale, present an original production: I Cenci, by composer Giorgio Battistelli, a work that premiered at LAC in Lugano on 26 May 2019, performed for the first time in Italian.

Based on the masterpiece written by Antonin Artaud in 1935 and set in papal Rome at the end of the 16th century, I Cenci tells the story of the terrible Count Cenci and his murder, for which his daughter Beatrice is accused and sentenced to death. I Cenci becomes a great tale poised between melologue and opera, in which the voices of the actors combine with the sounds of the instrumental ensemble and electronics, immersing the audience in a veritable “theatre of music”.

The soundscape directed by Francesco Bossaglia is impressive: the Ensemble900 of the Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana is joined by Alberto Barberis and Nadir Vassena for live electronics and diffusion, and Fabrizio Rosso for sound direction. The cast includes four performers, including Roberto Latini, an award-winning actor who has been conducting highly personal research into the possible amplification of the voice and the intrinsic power of words for many years. The cast is completed by Anahì Traversi, Michele Rezzonico, Elena Rivoltini and performer Marta Ciappina.

Giorgio Battistelli wrote the music and libretto for this work, in which he completely renounces the sung voice in order to return to Artaud's conception of “theatre and its double”, of “the theatre of cruelty” as “language in space, languages of sounds, cries, lights and onomatopoeia”. For Battistelli, all vocal emissions, from whispers to declamations, from speech to cries, from guttural sounds and noises to laughter and tears, participate, alongside highly flexible instrumental parts that become oscillograms of emotions, in this theatre of music that renounces all operatic vocality. The symphonic scenes create, through the orchestra and the spoken voice, intrusive and disturbing atmospheres that resonate in everyone's darkest depths of the psyche.