The company, founded in 1983 by Marco Martinelli, Ermanna Montanari, Luigi Dadina and Marcella Nonni develops its way intertwining the search for the “new” with the lesson of the theatrical Tradition. Playwright and director Martinelli draws inspiration from ancient authors as well as from present events, conceiving the stories for the actors, who therefore become co-authours of the plays to all effects.
Ermanna Montanari and the composer Luigi Ceccarelli have created together unforgettable pages of theatre-in-music, from L’Isola di Alcina to La mano, both Teatro delle Albe shows which have marked the history of Italian theatre over the last two decades. Now they take on LUS (LIGHT), a poem by Nevio Spadoni in Romagnol dialect, set in the early 20th century and centred around Bêlda, a clairvoyant and healer from the Romagna countryside. A powerful female figure, victim of the hypocrisy of her village, who in her proud cry of revolt against the cowardice of men allows herself to cast a curse of death on a “lousy priest” guilty of having disinterred her mother’s body. In this concerto Spadoni’s prayer-curse text is coupled with an original sound architecture created by Ceccarelli and Roccato (solo double-bassist and composer, one of the most original and prestigious names on the international music scene) in an alchemy that sees on stage three figures duelling with their “instruments”: the kaleidoscopic voice of Montanari, Ceccarelli with his computer for electronic processing in real time, and Roccato with his double-bass. Directed by Marco Martinelli, LUS is a concerto that recounts without recounting the incantatory magic of sounds, as ancient as the world, embodied with force in our present, in the sick and blinded “faces”, in the whirls of colour, blood and mercurochrome painted in watercolour by Margherita Manzelli.

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