by Marco Martinelli
devised and directed by Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari
on stage Ermanna Montanari
music Luigi Ceccarelli
trumpet Simone Marzocchi
sound director Marco Olivieri
space and costumes Ermanna Montanari and Anusc Castiglioni
shadows Anusc Castiglioni
light design Enrico Isola
lighting and video technician Fagio
shadows technician Alessandro Pippo Bonoli
light assistant Luca Pagliano
recorded Persian setar Darioush Madani
musical realisation Edisonstudio Roma
musical consultancy Francesco Altilio, Giulio Cintoni, Cristian Maddalena, Mirjana Nardelli, Fabrizio Nastari, Giovanni Tancredi, Andrea Veneri
iconographic consultancy Alessandro Volpe
dressmaking by Laura Graziani Alta Moda
graphics and silk-screen printing on fabric La Stamperia laboratorio artistico di A. Mosconi
stage props created by the Teatro delle Albe technical team Alessandro Pippo Bonoli, Fabio Ceroni, Luca Fagioli, Enrico Isola, Dennis Masotti, Danilo Maniscalco, Luca Pagliano
organisation and promotion Silvia Pagliano, Francesca Venturi
advisor and press office Rosalba Ruggeri
produced by Teatro delle Albe/Ravenna Teatro in collaboration with Fondazione Campania dei Festival – Napoli Teatro Festival Italia 2018 (progetto cofinanaziato da POC Campania 2014-2020) and Teatro Alighieri-Ravenna
lenght 1 hour
in Italian with English subtitles
Love’s faithful is a “polyptych in seven panels” written by Marco Martinelli “about” Dante Alighieri and our present day. Different voices speak to us in the individual panels: the fog of a dawn in 1321, the demon of the pit where the merchants of death are punished, a donkey that carried the poet on his last journey, the “scolding” imp who incites brawls about money, Italy kicking herself, Alighieri’s daughter Antonia, and “an end that is not an end”. These voices speak to us of the refugee, of the poet fled from his own city which has condemned him to burning at the stake; and now he is on his deathbed, exiled in Ravenna, sick with ague. First the fog slips in through the window cracks, enters that little room, and it describes him on the threshold of the extreme transition. Those voices are suspended between the fourteenth century and our own day, and Martinelli’s writing accepts, and not from today, the Dantesque challenge to hold together political and metaphysical “reality”, chronicle and spirituality.
Love is evoked as the polestar of the Love’s faithful, a force that frees humanity from violence, that saves “the garden plot that renders us so fierce”. The voices of this “polyptych” are one single voice that can contain numberless voices, that of Ermanna Montanari: air, fire, sound, matter.
This “polyptych” for the stage enriches the itinerary which, together with Ravenna Festival, Martinelli, Montanari and Teatro delle Albe began in 2017 with Inferno, and which will continue in 2019 and 2021 with the other two parts of “The Divine Comedy”.
Love’s faithful is one more tessera in their ceaseless dramaturgical, vocal, musical and visual research, alongside such wise folk as Luigi Ceccarelli and Marco Olivieri, Anusc Castiglioni and Simone Marzocchi; and it lies in that furrow where the vocal-sound alchemy of the figure is central.