Luca Ronconi Research Articles

L’opera alla televisione italiana fin de siècle (1976-2000)

The article introduces a few reflections on the history of opera in Italian television between the years 1976 and 2000, focusing on three moments of particular interest: the 1976 ‘premiere’ at La Scala, with Otello being broadcast live; Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims, staged in Pesaro by Luca Ronconi in 1984 as television media event; and La traviata a Paris “in its times and places”, broadcast both on television and on the internet in 2000. The purpose of the analysis is to help fill a relatively sizable gap in bibliography, suggesting a few lines of approach that may turn out to be useful even in undergraduate courses.

Luca Ronconi: Temporality and Illusions in the Adult-Child

In his 2002 stage play based on Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, theatre director Luca Ronconi creates the paradox of an adult-child. The novel becomes, for this adult Maisie, a “stream of memory” consisting of fragments of the original text subsequently reassembled into a script to be used by actors. The director deals with the novel avoiding any rewriting, and the novel is theatricalized without any mediation, its literary nature preserved and offered to the public with the illusion of dealing with the “reading” of one of James’s most challenging novels.

La «Fedra» di Seneca-Sanguineti: rilettura di una traduzione per la messinscena

The purpose of this study is to fill a gap about Edoardo Sanguineti’s translations in the current bibliography. Despite the fact that Friedmar Apel’s method brings a sweeping change to research in the field of translation studies and many works about Sanguineti’s activity have been published in recent years, an overall analysis regarding Seneca’s Phaedra still doesn’t exist. The drama was translated for Luca Ronconi’s theatrical production, performed at Teatro Stabile di Roma in 1969. Both play and translation were harshly criticized for their rhetoric, declamation and forceful emphasis: the same critics were directed to the original text. This study tries to show that Sanguineti perfectly knows that in the Seneca’s play – as Eliot said – «the drama is all in the word». Therefore Sanguineti creates a new style of translation, that he calls «oracolese»: its idiosyncratic syntax (caused by reproduction of ordo verborum ), assonances and alliterations, alienating commixture between high literal tradition and colloquial Italian grammar are strictly related to the mise-en-scene. Sanguineti realizes that Seneca’s dramas’ static plot has a special strength and – because «in translation there is no other speaker than translator» – this is the strongest relation with the original, the only point of contact possible.

Amor nello specchio (1622): Mirroring, Masturbation, and Same-Sex Love

Amor nello specchio (1622):Mirroring, Masturbation, and Same-Sex Love Emily Wilbourne (bio) The literal translation of Amor nello specchio is "love in the mirror," although "love reflected" provides a better sense of the phrase's meaning. The play by that name was first published in Paris by Giovan Battista Andreini in 1622 and has recently come to occupy a remarkable position in the work of scholars and theater practitioners.1 The magnetic pull of this particular text is attributable to the twists and turns of the commedia plot. The main character, Florinda, is initially in love with her own reflection. After some time she transfers her affections to the beautiful Lidia, and by the end of the play she has settled on Lidia's identical twin brother, Eugenio, a self-described hermaphrodite played by a woman in drag. This romp through variously configured sexual relations is fascinating for its frank depictions of female sexuality—Florinda consummates each of her three love affairs—and also for an ending that remains sexually and delightfully ambiguous despite the specter of resolution into compulsory heterosexuality. At the same time, the "real-world" backdrop to the play's performance and publication complicates further the shifting erotic allegiances staged as Amor nello specchio. The playwright, Giovan Battista, was both author and actor, although his character, Lelio, filled a fairly minor role. In this play Lelio is sharply rejected by a self-obsessed Florinda and after a failed attempt at seduction by magical incantation abandons the feminine temptations of romantic love in favor of a career in the military. Not only Lelio but all [End Page 54] the male characters of this play are shunted sideways, with the dramatic interest of Amor nello specchio securely centered on the female characters. The lead, Florinda, was played by Virginia Ramponi Andreini, wife of Giovan Battista and a renowned singer and actress in her own right, while her onstage lovers, Lidia and the (male) hermaphrodite, Eugenio, were both played by her husband's real-life lover, Virginia Rotari.2 In performance, then, the shifting sexual configurations of Amor nello specchio embodied and reconstituted the scandalous ménage à trois of the actors' offstage love lives. Add to this an onstage masturbation scene, some cross-dressing, and the temporal interval of nearly four hundred years that separates the early modern play from our postmodern moment, and it is clear why this text proved and proves so fascinating. Previous scholarship has valued Amor nello specchio for the compelling exegetical unfolding of male fantasies of female sexuality, with Siro Ferrone's Attori mercanti corsari (1993) and Piermario Vescovo's "Narciso, Psiche e Marte 'mestruato.' Una lettura di Amor nello specchio di Giovan Battista Andreini" (2004) the most notable examples.3 Understood thus, Giovan Battista's stylistic maturity is achieved at the expense of his female companions, with the characters of Florinda and Lidia repeatedly understood to ventriloquize the artistic product of a male author. Amor nello specchio is seen as both symptom of and transcendent signifier for Giovan Battista's extramarital affair: literary mastery routed through the penis. This model of reception is present also in the program notes of the two modern stagings the work has received, both directed by Luca Ronconi (1987 and 2002), and in a 1999 Italian film entitled Amor nello specchio, a period drama very loosely based around the play and on the historico-biographical circumstances that preceded its publication. 4 The film was directed by Salvatore Maira, who, with Anna Michela Borracci, published a modern edition of the original play in 1997; the edition includes an introduction by Maira that lightly revises an article first published in 1994.5 The film exists, therefore, in a weird historiographic relationship with the 1622 text and with modern scholarship on the work, functioning as an attempt to imagine and explain the conditions of the play's conception. In contrast with these authors and directors, my interest lies elsewhere. In relation to the improvised practice and formulaic conventions of commedia dell'arte performance, questions of authorship are inherently problematic.6 Stock characters were the norm, and each actor brought a repertoire of gestures, sounds, and phrases to his or her performance...

The Fascination with Distance: An Interview with Luca Ronconi

This is your first Monteverdi production, yet the myth of Orpheus has been very present in your career, from Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, which was your debut in Florence together with conductor Riccardo Muti, to Luigi Rossi's Orfeo at La Scala. Do you have a particular predilection for this character? I have to say that these were not my personal choices; I simply accepted proposals that were made to me. Undoubtedly, the myth of Orpheus is one of those that is more suited to musical theater, and it does fascinate me to focus, through these three operas, on the various versions of the Orphic myth, to bring out the ways in which this mythological conglomerate travels through the history of opera, and to explore Gluck's point of view with respect to Rossi's and Monteverdi's. This seems to me the most interesting aspect of producing these operas. Do you perceive unifying motives among the three operas?

Toward and Beyond Baroque Opera: Luca Ronconi and the Monteverdi Trilogy

Between March 1998 and May 2000, the Maggio Musicale in Florence celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of opera—commemorating the eminently Florentine 1598 production of Peri's and Rinuccini's Dafne—with new productions of Monteverdi's “trilogy.” The main idea behind the project was to connect the three operas by commissioning the production of all three to director Luca Ronconi and his team (with set designer Margherita Palli, costume designer Vera Marzot, and Ugo Tessitore as assistant director). The musical direction was instead assigned to three different groups and conductors: René Jacobs and his Concerto Vocale for L'Orfeo, Trevor Pinnock and his English Concert for Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, and Ivor Bolton with the Orchestra of Maggio Musicale Fiorentino for L'incoronazione di Poppea. The intent was to move from the somewhat radical philological approaches of Jacobs and Pinnock to Bolton's more moderate one. The core of the project was still Ronconi's directorial treatment, which promised to mark the three works with his famously original but extremely elegant approach.

Les tours de la machine et les détours du langage : Le Marchand de Venise mis en scène par Luca Ronconi

In his 1987 staging of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice at the Theâtre National de l’Odeon in Paris, Luca Ronconi adopted structuralist principles and thus highlighted the shifts of meaning between love and money, thanks to an original choice and direction of the actors on the one hand, and to the use of implements and machines (winch, hoist, counterweight, scales, glass kiln, weaving loom) linked to the trade and industry of Venice, on the other. Within the spirit of the Renaissance these machines were a meaningful addition to the operation of the Italian stage: by cutting and segmenting the scenic image thanks to the positioning of the curtains and frames, Luca Ronconi thus constructs the spectators’ point of focus on the play.

Unprecedented carbon–carbon bond formation induced by photoactivation of a platinum(iv)-diazido complex

UVA-induced photodecomposition of a Pt(IV)-diazido complex involves not only reduction to Pt(II) and N(2) release, but also O(2) evolution and formation of nitrene intermediates, whose trapping with (CH(3))(2)S gives rise to an unusual N,N'-bis(ethyl)sulfurousdiamide ligand in an apparently unprecedented process involving C-C bond formation.

Science and theatre in open dialogue: Biblioetica, Le Cas de Sophie K. and the postdramatic science play

Judging by the many new ventures into the genre of the 'science play' over the last few years, the surge of interest in science on stage continues unchecked. The most interesting aspect of this trend, however, is not quantity but variety, and the ways in which directors in particular are beginning to challenge the playwright-driven and biographically inflected engagements that have so far dominated science on stage. In this article we discuss two recent productions from two prominent directors: Luca Ronconi's Biblioetica, staged in Turin in February–March 2006, and Jean-François Peyret's Le Cas de Sophie K., given in Paris in April–May. The gulf between these productions and more theatrically conventional plays like Copenhagen and Arcadia is wide, and this new work represents a significant step for science plays in the direction of 'postdramatic theatre', a term used by Hans-Thies Lehmann in his groundbreaking work on the subject. We argue that for many reasons these productions suggest that the interaction of science and the stage lends itself by its very nature to the postdramatic condition.

Searching for a Satyr Play: the Significance of the ‘Parodos’

The parodos is the first appearance of the Chorus in a classical Greek drama, an occurrence common to tragedy, comedy – and that curious hybrid form, of which very few examples are extant, the satyr play. One of the two complete surviving, texts is the Ichneutai or Searching Satyrs of Sophocles: and in the following exercise in literary detection. Paola Polesso bases her investigation of the play not only on linguistic evidence but on clues which emerge from seeing the play in performance, to suggest the chronological context with in which the play may now be more precisely placed. Dr. Polesso, who presently teaches drama in the University of Bologna, has acted as assistant director to Luca Ronconi, and has been a contributor to numerous Italian theatre journals.

The Sins of the Fathers: Bergman, Ronconi, and Ibsen's ‘Wild Duck’

What is The Wild Duck ‘about’? What is the relationship between text and subtext in a work whose usually understood message ‘against idealism’ appears to contradict the conclusion no less usually drawn from A Doll's House? Thomas Bredsdorff here analyzes the approaches of two major modern directors of the play – Ingmar Bergman, in his Stockholm production of 1972, and Luca Ronconi, who directed it five years later in Rome – and suggests the ‘hidden dialogue’ at work in such a comparison. He also explores the issues of patricide and power which may be deduced by applying the insights of Erich Fromm concerning the nature of human aggression, basing his own conclusions on a careful examination of Ibsen's highly pertinent stage directions. Thomas Bredsdorff has been Professor of Scandinavian Literature at the University of Copenhagen since 1978, and theatre critic of Politiken since 1965. This essay is translated from his most recent book, Magtspil (Power Play), published in Copenhagen by Gyldendal in 1986.

The BITEF Festival

The Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF) has been recognized as one of the leading international showcases for innovative theatrical production because the Festival has consistently found and presented whatever has been most current and avant-garde in world experimental theatre. During the ‘60s and ‘70s when such well-known avant-gardists as The Performance Group (USA), Nuria Espert (Spain), Luca Ronconi (Italy) and Grotowski (Poland) first appeared in the international spotlight, BITEF tended to be of radical style, with extreme variations in theatrical convention. The Festival, founded in 1967, has customarily given itself an annual subtitle, a phrase placing each year’s invited productions into an overall trend. Subtitles have included descriptive classifications such as “New Directors of Our Times,” “Roots of Theatre,” and “New Theatre Spaces,” among others.

Luca Ronconi

In 1966, the Italian critics labeled Luca Ronconi a “producer of madness,” not only for the themes he chose but for the frenzied characterization typical of the acting. Later, after Orlando Furioso (1969), [see T47], they saw him as a conjurer of extraordinary medieval festivals, through a play of simultaneous scenes that bordered on the “extraordinary and magical.” But since the critical acclaim of Orlando eight years ago, Ronconi has never again wanted to take on a performance/production that could be performed all over the world, precisely in order to free himself from the label that each success brings. Even when he recreated Ariosto's poem for television, he drew on—as the medium itself demanded—an entirely new formula. It is time, then, to put aside easy definitions and to look without preconceptions at Ronconi and what he has done since Orlando Furioso.

Orland Furioso

Orlando Furioso is an environmental spectacle developed by director Luca Ronconi and writer Edoardo Sanguineti, based on the poem by Lodovico Ariosto. It was first performed last summer in Milan and toured throughout Italy and the continent. It most recently appeared at the Odin Teatret's spring seminar in Denmark. Performances in New York and a U.S. tour are tentatively scheduled for the fall. The photos which accompany this article are from a performance in Milan.