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Osvaldo Guerrieri, Fantasy raining on the Colline
Magda Poli, Five Dorothies and a wonderful world
(...) The Festival delle Colline Torinesi’s first evening presented two very different and yet equally mind-blowing shows.
Kansas, by the young but very fierce company Fanny & Alexander from Romagna, is the second stage of Luigi de Angelis and Chiara Lagani's journey in the fantastic world of The Wizard of Oz. It’s a journey between the oneiric and the hallucinating the one that Dorothy (Lagani herself, very good) makes inside a museum. The Dorothy we’re talking about is, in this case, a woman multiplied by five: she turns from a cleaning woman into an elegant lady falling in love with a picture, then into a usherette making her dream come true, then into a performer obsessively repeating her number, then into a short-sighted student dealing with her difficult relationship with things, and in the end she is only herself. Now, this metamorphosis expresses and manifests itself by a manic precision of details and the atmosphere of a forthcoming storm, which has a precise symbolic correspondence with Dorothy, whose surname not by chance is Storm. And with the rain suddenly falling on the proscenium of Teatro Astra like a curtain of water, we can't help but thinking about the rainbow of the very famous song that goes "Somewhere over the rainbow...", while everything seems to go crazy, the pictures spin like rotors, the platform moves back, crashes and thunders get bigger and explode. (...)
The countryside of Kansas, home of Dorothy, the protagonist of The Wizard of Oz, the 1939 movie inspired by the first of the 14 books about Oz by Frank Baum, changes for the company Fanny & Alexander, in the concept by Chiara Lagani and Luigi de Angelis, into a museum. And it's on a sepia and grey staging, among the portraits of women by famous painters, that five Dorothies search for their wonderful world "over the rainbow", like the famous song sung by Judy Garland in the movie goes, in a show with oneiric characteristics, Kansas, that joins a visionary inventiveness and a rigour whose formal signs, from time to time, seem to flow into a refined intellectualism.
Kansas, which made its début at the Festival delle Colline Torinesi, is the further stage of a project made up of 6 shows. Of course it's not the narrative-chronological order that Fanny & Alexander are interested in, their research goes deep into the artwork’s heart, outlining paths that are tangents of meaning, explorations and investigations of emotions, superimpositions of signs in charades of evocations. In the atmosphere of a brewing storm, Dorothy the cleaning woman, a cultured and elegant Dorothy, Dorothy the usherette, a Dorothy repeating a dance step that obsessively turns into a stumble, Dorothy the shy and short-sighted student, all of them being played by Chiara Lagani, try to capture their moment of truth in the balance among dream, desire and reality.
In the end the storm breaks out, the pictures whirlpool and become spirals swallowing everything, the museum disappears and here are Him, the small kneeling Hitler, Charlie, the kid with the hands nailed to his school desk by two pencils (the evocation of two artworks by Maurizio Cattelan) and a small threatening tank are the new Dorothy's fellow travellers, not reassuring fantastic figures anymore, but disturbing, tangible signs of a world of violence and compulsion.
Theatre Performances
Grey Speech | WEST | NORTH | SOUTH | HIM | AMORE (2 atti) | Dorothy | Heliogabalus | Vaniada | Aqua Marina | Ardis II | Ardis I