Casanova

by
Fabrizio Sinisi

freely inspired by
Story of my life by Giacomo Casanova

directed
Fabio Condemi

with
Sandro Lombardi

and with (in alphabetical order)
Marco Cavalcoli
Simona De Leo
Alberto Marcello
Betti Pedrazzi

for the first time on stage
Edoardo Matteo

scenes and image dramaturgy
Fabio Cherstich

costumes
Gianluca Sbicca

lighting design
Giulia Pastore

music and sound design
Andrea Gianessi

assistant director
Andrea Lucchetta

assistant set designer
Andrea Colombo

assistant costume designer
Eleonora Terzi

stage manager and chief stagehand
Enrico Ghiglione

chief electrician and light giver
Filip Marocchi

sound engineer
Andrea Gianessi

toolmaker
Benedetta Monetti

stage seamstress
Lucia Menegazzo

scenes realised at
ERT scenography workshop

costumes
Farani Sartoria Teatrale

footwear
Pedrazzoli footwear

wigs
Audello Theatre

production
LAC Lugano Art and Culture

in co-production with
Emilia Romagna Theatre ERT / National Theatre
TPE - Teatro Piemonte Europa
Lombardi - Tiezzi Company

Casanova 
Sandro Lombardi 

Mesmerista
Marco Cavalcoli 

Henriette
Simona De Leo 

Voltaire
Alberto Marcello

Marchesa D’Urfé
Betti Pedrazzi 

Casanova child
Edoardo Matteo 

Sonata di fantasmi

Casanova is a meditation on memory and time: not only those of Giacomo Casanova, but of an entire era. There are characters by observing whom one can measure the transition of a historical epoch. Casanova - who was born at the turn of the century, in 1725, and died on the threshold of the next, in 1798 - is one of these. Few more than him have been so profoundly European, expressions of an exuberant culture free of national boundaries; few more than him have been able, almost despite themselves, to embody a century. Giacomo Casanova is perhaps the most perfect litmus test of the eighteenth century, a century that experienced one of the greatest cultural, political and anthropological upheavals that history can remember: the end of the aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeoisie; the waning of religious myths and the acceleration of market capitalism; the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment and materialist rationalism. It is the century of Kant and the “disappearance of reality” in favour of the subjective perception of the world. It is the century of the Lisbon earthquake, which in 1755 shocked the consciences of the whole of Europe, generating the belief that not a divine wisdom governed nature, but blind and purely deterministic chance. It is the century of Voltaire, who in fact appears on stage as a speaker to comment on events; it is the century of technology and the first industrial machines; it is the century of the first flight aboard a hot-air balloon, which aroused immense amazement and made many dream of the subversion of the laws of nature by means of human ingenuity. Finally, it is the century of the French Revolution, a true watershed between two epochs. In all these events, Casanova was in some way a witness, an uncomfortable, troubled conscience - the full expression of his time and, at the same time, its removed element, something tenacious, disturbing and regressive that progress must expel in order to evolve. This melancholic and rancorous man, locked up like a prisoner in a small library in Bohemia, is not only a famous personality of the time that was: he is a tragicomic mask, a changing paradigm, an icon marking the end of one world and the beginning of another.
Theatre, said Artaud, is dialogue with the dead. This is the centre around which Casanova revolves: theatre as a rite that connects the living and the dead, present and past, what is there, what is no longer there and even what will be. Time is irrevocable and flows in only one direction, what once happened will never return: this is what the characters who come to visit Casanova during this long night continually remind us, like a kind of untiring warning. And yet, the theatrical rite allows what is impossible in life: to break the univocity of time, to invert its flow, to upset the cards of the irrevocable. Giacomo Casanova's life has always been a hymn to vitality: adventurer, lover, gambler, fugitive, soldier of fortune, itinerant philosopher - his existence is always traversed by an irrepressible and elusive desire: a restlessness, a continuous flight forward. Now, in the last act of his life, that restlessness becomes emblematic of a desperate rebellion against mortality. This is what the different characters in this sonata of ghosts represent: the affable and ambiguous mesmerist; the friar Marino Balbi, Casanova's cellmate during his time in the Piombi prison; the young beloved (and then abandoned) Henriette; and above all the lunar, esoteric and futuristic Marchesa D'Urfé: attempts to stop the entropy of the world, to change that irrevocability that makes every life appear like a destiny. Each of them represents a turning-point in Casanova's life, a question mark in his biography, like a crossroads left dramatically open. As Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: one only remembers what has never ceased to ache.

Ghosts, memory, enlightenment

Winter 1798: a doctor expert in mesmerism arrives in Dux, Bohemia, to visit the old librarian. That librarian is Giacomo Casanova, who has been in the service of the Count of Waldstein for fifteen years. Casanova shows up old and shabby. He is cataloguing books and is angry with Dux's courtiers who speak to him in German, a language he does not know. The only undertaking that excites him now is the composition of the Histoire de ma vie, the gigantic memoir of his life, his adventures, his travels and his escapes. Having reached the seventh volume, Casanova began to lose his memory and, terrified, called in the mesmerist to retrieve it. The old Casanova, eternally exiled and a stranger in the New World, a force from the past, is obsessed with lost time, lost childhood, and remembers to relive those moments with all his being. During the mesmeric session, Casanova, in an altered state of consciousness, begins to remember; but they are not true memories, they are different from those he described in his memoirs, they have the character of visions, premonitions, apparitions. The doctor listens to Casanova's story, a story populated by ghosts, by phantom images. The memory for Casanova begins with a nosebleed episode. A child with blood dripping profusely from his nose. After the daydreaming memory of the nosebleed, Casanova finds himself in the darkness of a convent, the white bed illuminated by moonlight, the voices of the priests, the priests' impositions on him, the bonds with his companions. Casanova, now deeply immersed in mesmeric sleep, finds himself at a Venetian banquet during his last night of freedom. In fact, on the night of 25-26 July 1755 he was arrested and locked up in the Piombi. The official charge was for spreading anti-religious verses. The mesmerist doctor who tries to get him cured/awake is confused in the dream with his cellmate, the Somasque friar Marino Balbi. On the night of the escape from the Piombi, the Lisbon earthquake occurs, an event that shook the conscience of an entire generation. The earthquake had a strong influence on many European thinkers of the Enlightenment, who debated the so-called philosophy of disaster. The apparently arbitrary way in which people were spared or killed by the earthquake was used by Voltaire to discredit the concept of the “best possible world”. Casanova fled Venice. His long exile begins. In Paris, he frequented the salon of the Marquise D'Urfé, an admirer of the esoteric arts. The Marquise, according to Casanova himself, “mad only by excess of intelligence”, with the initiatory name of Egeria, was a connoisseur of magic, a disciple of the alchemist Benoît de Maillet known as Taliamed, an “excellent alchemist” herself. D'Urfé possessed a veritable alchemical laboratory and had collected a vast harvest of important manuscripts, especially Paracelsian, in her library. The Marquise gave way to Henriette. In his autobiographical work, Casanova recounts that in the autumn of 1749, in Cesena, he came across a charming young French woman who, fleeing from the wrongs inflicted on her by her husband and father-in-law, was travelling - wearing men's clothes - to Parma in the company of an elderly Captain of a Hungarian regiment. The young woman, whose education and sensitivity betray her high lineage, calls herself Henriette. Perhaps Henriette is the only woman Casanova has ever loved, yet he cannot remember her face. The last thing Henriette said to Casanova (or rather wrote on a glass) was “You will also forget Henriette”. At the end of the session, the purpose of which was to recover his lost memory, Casanova realises that perhaps what he has to do is forget everything.

The scenography of Casanova continues the research path I have been pursuing with Fabio Condemi since 2017, which began at the Venice Biennale with Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser. Since then, we have gone through great texts, theatrical and otherwise: La filosofia nel boudoir by Sade, Nottuari by Thomas Ligotti, Calderón by Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten. In all these works, and now in Casanova, our approach to the stage has never been monumental, but has always sought a lightness capable of generating ephemeral images, which compose and dissolve before the eyes of the spectator, as in a dream.
The scenic device of Casanova explicitly cites the library of Dux, in Bohemia, where the protagonist, by now an old man, writes his memoirs. This is where Fabrizio Sinisi's dramaturgical intuition takes shape: the story unfolds through a mesmeric sitting, transforming the memory into a journey between appearances and fades. The library thus becomes a frame enclosing a changing content, as in the works of Giulio Paolini, who investigated the concept of the frame not only as a limit of the work, but as a gateway to other worlds. In our staging, Dux's bookcase is this perforated frame, which opens onto visions and inner landscapes, evoking the cinema of Peter Greenaway and Ingmar Bergman, in particular The Place of Strawberries and Fanny and Alexander, in which memory transforms space into a place of the mind.
At the centre of the scene is the play of superimpositions and transparencies. Casanova child animates the space with a magic lantern, bringing into the library external landscapes, while a large window does not look out onto a forest, but onto a moon rock that recalls the stars and infinite time. Between the shelves, a painting reproduces a celestial vault, a painted sky that becomes a window onto another space.
Fundamental is the work on light by Giulia Pastore, who creates a play on darkness and light, allowing us to construct a mental montage of scenic elements. Like the light, Andrea Gianessi's musical dramaturgy intervenes in the process of expansion and contraction of space. The soundscape projects the outside into the inside: the sound of the Venetian lagoon mixes with that of a mechanical cello, a celibate machine, which - like all the machines of vision on stage - is made to open up openings, but without a definitive destination. The convent is evoked by distant choirs, the earthquake by a deaf vibration, an echo of memory.
Gianluca Sbicca's costumes also participate in this construction of a non-linear time. The 18th century is mentioned in the costumes and in some scenic elements, but it is not faithfully reconstructed: it is a divertissement, a play with contemporary visual imagery.
Every object on stage is a mechanism of memory. The small hot air balloon that stands out on the stage, almost a toy, is transformed in Sandro Lombardi's interpretation into a gigantic image, capable of opening up worlds. Like the nosebleed Casanova had as a child - the nosebleed, the first vision from which everything originates -, each stage element becomes a point of access to memories, a fragment that expands into new visions.

When Fabio Condemi asked me to work on this project, his interest in eighteenth-century costumes, linked to Venetian imagery, was clear from the outset: the shapes of Pietro Longhi's paintings, Tiepolo's colours and the twilight atmospheres typical of the winter lagoon. To approach this vision, I imagined figures whose silhouette and colours are immediately recognisable, offering the audience a clear reference and making them identifiable. It all started with Casanova's costume, which gave me the key to reading all the others, and Fabio Cherstich's scenic layout, which, with its installation approach to space, required costumes of 18th century style, but without the decorations and superstructures typical of Rococo. 
The final effect is to bring to the stage costumes that, in their own way, are ‘minimalist’, with decisive colours and, when lit against the light, become silhouettes that immediately evoke the era of Giacomo Casanova.

In the Bohemian library where he is confined, Casanova chases with the light of a candle the faces of the people he is forgetting, without finding them.  
When night falls and he finally manages to dive into the dream of a mesmeric sitting, the sound of the water takes him to the dark sea of Venice, from which he re-emerges in the space of his memories. Here, as if moved by the lights of a merry-go-round, the figures that appear to him light up before fading away and appear to be nothing but glimmers of reality, fragments of the past visiting a mind destined to oblivion. 
Casanova on stage becomes a spectator of elusive images, dissolving and recomposing themselves in new forms, mingling between colours and smoke. While he chases his mother who has abandoned him on a dark shore, tries to escape from the cone of light of the Piombi prison, clings tenderly to the reflection of Henriette's love, the shadow of earthquakes and revolutions appears behind him.  
But in the space between light and dark, in the time between sleep and wakefulness, all that is dear to us can return, regardless of time passing and the world changing.

The music and sound design I conceived for Casanova sink into the theme of memory that is gradually fading, a ghost, a blurred image lost in time, the boundary between an ancient world destined to disappear and a revolutionary future yet to be understood. The cello is my dramaturgical and musical guideline, a thread of memory that is never completely broken; it is the instrument linked to the only woman perhaps loved by Casanova, the only one whose face he cannot remember. The sound environment is an electronic transfiguration of 18th-century Venice, with Vivaldi's music in the background and the lapping of the water in the calli, among the moored boats. The atmosphere is suspended, fluid, as in a mesmeric séance in which sounds emerge to embody the people and stories of the protagonist's life. A swirling acousmatic world of which the cello is actually the pivot and origin, in the sound design elements as well as in the music. From Vivaldi's cello sonatas, deconstructed and recomposed, echoed or estranged in retro-futurist synthetic sounds, to electronically processed samples taken from experiments in 20th-century cello music, up to minimalist procedures such as loop repetition, dilation and displacement of the original musical cells. Each sound inevitably plunges us into the blurred ghosts of memory, into the landscape of Casanova's ultimate solitude.

Fabrizio Sinisi
Dramaturgy
Playwright, poet and writer, in 2012 he made his debut as a playwright with La grande passeggiata directed by Federico Tiezzi. Since 2010 he has been dramaturg of the Compagnia Lombardi-Tiezzi and artistic consultant of the Centro Teatrale Bresciano. His works have also been translated and performed in Austria, Croatia, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States. He collaborates regularly with “Doppiozero” and the daily newspaper “Domani”. He has been awarded several prizes, including the American Playwrights Project, the Testori Prize for Literature and the National Prize of Theatre Critics. His first novel will be published by Mondadori in 2025.

Fabio Condemi
Director
Born in 1988, he graduated from the directing course at the ‘Silvio d'Amico’ National Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome. He then collaborated with Giorgio Barberio Corsetti as an assistant for theatre and opera productions and educational projects. In 2018 he debuted at the Venice Theatre Biennale directed by Antonio Latella withJakob Von Gunten, based on the novel by Robert Walser. The following year he presented at the India Theatre in Rome and at the Verdi Theatre in Pordenone Questo è il tempo in cui attendo la grazia, a monologue inspired by Pasolini's scripts and interpreted by Gabriele Portoghese. From 2019 he is part, together with DOM, Industria Indipendente, mk, Muta Imago, of the new production and housing project of Teatro di Roma ‘Oceano Indiano’. In 2020 he presents at the Venice Theatre Biennale La filosofia nel boudoir del Marchese de Sade, a show with which, in 2021, he wins the Ubu Award for Best Director. For LAC's digital project Lingua Madre. Capsule per il futuro he signs the direction of Analisi Logica from the text by Riccardo Favaro, a work selected for the Swiss Theatre Meeting 2022. In 2022, he stages Calderón by Pier Paolo Pasolini, produced as part of the international project ‘Prospero Extended Theatre’. In 2023 he directs Nottuari, based on the works of Thomas Ligotti, and debuts as an opera director with Benjamin Britten's The turn of the screw for I teatri di Reggio Emilia. In 2024 he signed the direction of Ultimi crepuscoli sulla terra, inspired by the works of Roberto Bolano.

Sandro Lombardi
Casanova
Actor, playwright and writer. Directed by Federico Tiezzi, he has interpreted, among others, texts by Aristophanes, Beckett, Bernhard, Brecht, D'Annunzio, Luzi, Pasolini, Pirandello, Schnitzler. Of great importance were his performances of Giovanni Testori, which revolutionised the image of the writer from Lombardy. Four times, between 1988 and 2002, he received the Ubu Prize for best male interpretation. He has recorded on CD: Poesie di Pasolini e l'Inferno di Dante (Garzanti); Il teatro di Giovanni Testori negli spettacoli di Sandro Lombardi e Federico Tiezzi (ERI Editions); Cleopatràs di Giovanni Testori. His most recent, unanimously acclaimed performances are Antichi Maestri by Thomas Bernhard (2020), Scene da Faust by Johann W. Goethe and Il Purgatorio by Mario Luzi (2022). He directed Anna Della Rosa in Erodiàs + Mater strangosciàs (2023). Between theatre, music and radio he has worked with, among others, Furio Bordon, Arturo Cirillo, Giancarlo Cobelli, Rainer W. Fassbinder, Roberto Latini, Claudio Longhi, Mario Martone, Riccardo Muti, Giorgio Pressburger, Carlo Quartucci, Pascal Rambert, Paolo Rosa, Giorgio Sangati, Fabrizio Sinisi, Fabio Vacchi. He published Gli anni felici, a training novel winner of the Bagutta Opera Prima Prize in 2004, for Garzanti. In 2009, his first novel, Le mani sull'amore (Feltrinelli) was published, followed in 2015 by Queste assolate tenebre (Lindau), focused on his work with Mario Luzi.

Marco Cavalcoli
Mesmerist
He trained attending the Teatro delle Albe and then working in the experimental scene of the early 1990s, in particular with Teatrino Clandestino, the disco theatre company Teddy Bear Company and finally Fanny & Alexander, of which he has been a member since 1998 and with which he has performed in numerous theatre, music and installation productions. Moving between theatre, music, audiovisual and radio productions, he has worked with, among others, Elvira Frosini and Daniele Timpano, lacasadargilla, Nextime Ensemble and Tempo Reale, Mario Perrotta, Giorgina Pi, Mauro Lamanna, Gob Squad, Geppy Gleijeses, Fabio Cherstich, Fabio Condemi, Nerval Teatro, Anagoor, Silvia Rigon, Jacopo Panizza and Wang Chong, Forced Entertainment and Aldes, Berardo Carboni, Paolo Bonacelli, Veronica Cruciani, Lorenzo Gioielli, Luigi Polimeni, Dimitri Grechi Espinoza. In cinema he has been directed by Sydney Sibilia, the Manetti Bros, Antonio Bigini and Alessandro Soetje, and as a voice actor by Mitra Farahani and Giovanni Piperno. He reads for Ad alta voce and Cose che succedono la notte programmes on Rai Radio 3. He teaches at the “Silvio D'Amico” National Academy of Dramatic Art and at STAP Brancaccio in Rome. In 2022 he won the Ubu Award as best Italian actor.

Simona De Leo
Henriette
Born in 2001 in Cinquefrondi, province of Reggio Calabria. After graduating from high school, she attended the ‘Luca Ronconi’ Theatre School of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, where she graduated in June 2024. In December of the same year, he took part in the play A Midsummer Night's Dream (continuous commentary) by William Shakespeare/ Riccardo Favaro directed by Carmelo Rifici.
 

Alberto Marcello
Voltaire
Born in 1996, he began his training with actress Lea Karen Gramsdorff, with whom he started a long collaboration. In 2017, he was admitted to the ‘Luca Ronconi’ Theatre School of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano directed by Carmelo Rifici, where he will train, among others, with Alessio Maria Romano, Francesca della Monica, Antonio Latella, Paolo Rossi, Stefano Massini, Massimo Popolizio, Marta Ciappina and Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli. He made his debut at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan with Doppio sogno, based on the novel of the same name by Arthur Schnitzler, directed by Carmelo Rifici, with whom he also worked in Ci guardano - prontuario di un innocente, as part of Lingua Madre. Capsule per il futuro, a project that won the Ubu Special Prize 2021. After graduating, he took part in numerous shows working with different directors, including Giacomo Lilliù in Teoria della classe disagiata, Romeo Gasparini in Il grande nulla, Chiara Cingolani in Astra Nostra, Federico Tiezzi in Il Purgatorio. La notte lava la mente, Andrea Chiodi in Sogno di una notte di mezza estate and La Passione, Giovanni Ortoleva in La dodicesima notte (or whatever) and La signora delle Camelie. On television she took part in the series Il Mostro, directed by Stefano Sollima.

Betti Pedrazzi
Marchioness D'Urfé
A graduate of the ‘Silvio D'Amico’ National Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome, she began working with Luca Ronconi, her first teacher and director. In those years she founded the company Il Quadro and managed the Teatro Nuovo Eden in Carpi. In theatre, among many others, he has worked with Luca Ronconi, Giancarlo Cobelli, Vincenzo Salemme, Carlo Cecchi, Valerio Binasco, Toni Servillo, Roberto Andò, and Jean Bellorini. She won the Borgio Verezzi prize as best supporting actress in the role of Emilia in William Shakespeare's Othello and was nominated for the Ubu prize for Carlo Goldoni's Trilogia della villeggiatura. She was recently directed by Lino Musella in Pinter Pary. At the cinema, among her most significant recent works are 18 regali by Francesco Amato, Figli by Mattia Torre and Giuseppe Bonito, È stato la mano di Dio by Paolo Sorrentino, Il più bel secolo della mia vita by Alessandro Bardani, Benvenuti in casa Esposito by Gianluca Ansanelli, Immaculate, an international co-production directed by Michael Mohan, Iddu by Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza, in competition at the Venice Film Festival 2024. In television, he has participated in several dramas, among the latest Your Honour and The Fenoglio Method directed by Alessandro Casale, Imma Tataranni by Francesco Amato and Antonia directed by Chiara Malta.

Edoardo Matteo
Casanova child
He was born in 2012 in Milan, the eldest of three brothers. Shy and introverted, he has always loved show business and cinema, finding in acting a way to impersonate his favourite characters and express himself to the fullest. In 2019, he moved to Switzerland, where he began to cultivate his passion and attend an acting school. Fabio Condemi's Casanova marks his stage debut.

Fabio Cherstich
Set and image dramaturgy
Born in 1984, he is a director and set designer for theatre and opera. His work combines meticulous attention to visual aesthetics with a passion for new media and contemporary artistic languages. He has worked in numerous theatres, including the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Teatro Massimo in Palermo, Teatro dell'Opera in Rome, Opera d'Avignon, Opera in Marseille, Teatro Maillon in Strasbourg, Teatro Argentina in Rome and I Teatri di Reggio Emilia. His productions have been invited to prestigious international festivals such as Festival di Napoli, Festival Première-Strasbourg, Festival Dei Due Mondi di Spoleto, STUCK Contemporary Art Center Festival in Leuven and the Biennale Teatro di Venezia. He is the creator and director of Operacamion, an opera-on-the-road described by the New York Times as “a unique project capable of taking opera back to its origins”. As director of performance events in the field of fashion and design, he has collaborated with brands such as Cassina, Gufram, Memphis Milano, Fay, Hermès, Off-WHITE and Acne Studio. He teaches Aesthetics of Theatre Direction at the Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi and IULM University in Milan. Always interested in contemporary art, with a particular focus on the Manhattan underground scene of the 1980s and 1990s, he has been curator of the Larry Stanton Estate in New York since 2019.

Gianluca Sbicca
Costumes
Born in 1973, he studied set design at the Brera Academy in Milan. After various experiences in the fashion field, he approached theatre as Jacques Reynaud's assistant for Lolita - script by Vladimir Nabokov (2001), directed by Luca Ronconi, with whom he also collaborated on Marina Cvetaeva's Phoenix (2001). Also by the Maestro was the first show for which he designed the costumes, Giordano Bruno's Candelaio (2001). Thus began an artistic association with Ronconi, which continued for 15 years until his last show, Lehman Trilogy. He then collaborated regularly with Claudio Longhi, for whom he designed the costumes for several shows, including La classe operaia va in paradiso and Ho paura torero. Over the course of his career, he has also worked in both prose and opera with numerous directors, including Massimo Popolizio, Stefano Ricci, Peter Greenaway, Alvis Hermanis, Gabriele Lavia, Federico Tiezzi, Valter Malosti, Giorgio Sangati, Jacopo Gassmann, Sergio Blanco, Roberto Latini, Fabio Condemi, Fabio Cherstich, Lino Guanciale, and Fanny & Alexander. He collaborates permanently with fashion designer Antonio Marras on several installations and theatre performances. In 2018 he won the Ubu Award and the Le Maschere del Teatro Italiano Award for the costumes of Freud o l'interpretazione dei sogni by Federico Tiezzi; in 2022 he received the Ubu Award for the costumes of M Il figlio del secolo by Massimo Popolizio.
 

Giulia Pastore
Lighting design
After classical high school and a degree in Disciplines of Live Performance, she specialised in light design, following prose and dance companies with Italian and international productions and tours since 2012. He has designed the lights for Deflorian/Tagliarini(La vegetariana, Avremo ancora occasione di ballare insieme, Chi ha ucciso mio padre, Il cielo non è un fondale, Memoria di ragazza), Carmelo Rifici(Le relazioni pericolose), VicoQuartoMazzini(La ferocia), Cristina Rizzo(Bolero Effect, Ikea, Prelude), Marco D'Agostin(Best Regards, nominated for the 2021 Ubu Awards as best dance performance), Marco Lorenzi(La collezionista and Affabulazione), Philippe Kratz(Lydia, The red shoes, Camera Obscura), Alessio Maria Romano(Principia), Giorgia Nardin(Ghisher, Anahit), Fattoria Vittadini(Amor, Salvaje, To this pourpose only) and for all the works of Annamaria Ajmone, with whom she is nominated for the Ubu 2022 Award for best lighting design. From 2018 to 2021 she was in charge of the technical direction and stagings of SpazioFattoria, T!nk P!nk and Festival del Silenzio in Milan. Since 2022 he has been teaching at the Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi in Milan. In 2024 he won the Ubu Prize for best lighting design for the show La ferocia.

Andrea Gianessi
Music and sound design
Composer, sound designer, musician and author. Graduated with honours in Dams Musica in Bologna, he is dedicated to experimenting with the dramaturgical potential of sound. He is the founder of tsd - Teatro dei servi disobbedienti and of DAS - Dispositivo Arti Sperimentali di Bologna, of which he is the artistic director until December 2024. In 2025, he founded Diade, a performance research group, with director Federica Amatuccio. He creates music and sound design for theatre, collaborating with artists such as Fabio Condemi, Antonio Latella, Giuseppe Stellato, Franco Visioli (Stabilemobile), Silvia Rigon, Michela Lucenti (Balletto Civile), Fanny & Alexander, Jacopo Squizzato, Menoventi, Mitmacher Teatro, Ateliersi, Andrea Centazzo, Masque Teatro. His works have been staged in contexts such as Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT, Teatro di Roma, Teatro Stabile di Torino, TPE - Teatro Piemonte Europa, LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, CSS Teatro stabile di innovazione del Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Campania Teatro Festival, Festival delle Colline Torinesi, Kilowatt Sansepolcro, Cantiere Poetico Santarcangelo, Ravenna Festival, OperaEstate, Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna, La Biennale Teatro di Venezia.

Andrea Lucchetta
Assistant director
Born in 1998, he began his professional career by staging Josè Saramago's Blindness at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples in 2017. In 2021, he obtained his directing diploma at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica ‘Silvio D'Amico’ in Rome. He has directed some of his own productions with the guidance of professionals such as Giorgio Barberio Corsetti in Sulla strada maestra by Anton Chekhov, Massimiliano Civica in a study on Patroni Griffi, Arturo Cirillo in Questi Fantasmi by Eduardo De Filippo. He collaborates as assistant for Sergio Ariotti, Andrea De Rosa, Andrea Baracco, Carlo Cecchi, Fabio Condemi, Leonardo Manzan. H

LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura 
11-12.03.2025

Teatro Astra, Torino  
18-23.03.2025 

Teatro Bonci, Cesena  
27-30.03.2025 

Teatro Rossini, Pesaro  
03-06.04.2025