For over thirty years the company Fanny & Alexander – founded by Chiara Lagani and Luigi De Angelis – has been producing interdisciplinary works, combining classical form and content with experimentation and new technologies. At the LAC they will be presenting Sylvie e Bruno, finalist in the 2021 Premi Ubu for best new Italian text or dramatic writing.

Based on the novel by Lewis Carrol, Sylvie e Bruno is a work whose dreamlike vision takes us out of our ordinary perception of reality. The work features two narratives that develop along parallel lines: one is a thwarted love story, the other a tale of “magic” whose protagonists are Sylvie, a girl, and her brother Bruno, a tiny and inarticulate boy. The starting point is that liminal state between sleep and waking in which reality begins to be replaced by pliable facts, a state of partial wakefulness and, at the same time, semi abandonment in which the mind begins to ascend upwards. But something forces its way into these two worlds and destabilizes them: in the magical world a violent coup d’etat has just taken place, while in the real world a terrible and mysterious pestilence is raging. One is a collapsing world suddenly entered by the power of beauty and the imagination; the other is a world afflicted by a terrible and symbolic disease, a world that nonetheless manages to survive through the power of love and art.