fedeli d'Amore (Love's faithful)
a polyptych in seven panels for Dante Alighieri
by Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari
music Luigi Ceccarelli
Ermanna Montanari (ph. Enrico Fedrigoli©)
with Ermanna Montanari (voice), Simone Marzocchi (trumpet)
soud designer Marco Olivieri
script Marco Martinelli
in association with Teatro delle Albe/Ravenna Teatro, Fondazione Campania dei Festival - Napoli Teatro Festival, Ravenna Festival
with the support of Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale, Ministero della Cultura, Italian Cultural Institute in New York, Regione Emilia-Romagna/Cultura d’Europa, ATER Fondazione.
in collaboration with The Consulate General of Italy in New York, Com.It.Es, Italian and American Playwrights Project, Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò NYU.
Performance on the stage poem by Martinelli, focused on the vocal research of Ermanna Montanari (awarded “2018 best Italian actress” for this work).
fedeli d’Amore (Love's faithful) is the new stage poem by Marco Martinelli focused on the exceptional vocal research of Ermanna Montanari (awarded “2018 best Italian actress” for this performance). The Italian and American Playwright Project selected the text revolving around Dante and our present times and published by PAJ (Performing Art Journal) Publications. Different voices speak to us in these seven panels: the fog of 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, who are one single voice that can contain numberless voices, that of Montanari, speak to us of the refugee, of the poet fled from his own city and now laying on his deathbed, exiled in Ravenna, voices that are suspended between the fourteenth century and our own day. In a scene generated by a vocal, sonorous, visual and dramaturgical alchemy able to bind together the psyche and the world, Dante is invoked while embracing a single salvation: Love is what makes us rebel, it is the force that liberates and elevates.
(In Italian with English surtitles)
New York Premiere
Thursday, Jan. 26, Friday, Jan. 27, Saturday, Jan. 28 - 8 p.m.
La MaMa Downstairs Theatre
66 East 4 Street - New York, NY
Tickets available at https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/1144598
Ermanna Montanari -actress, author and set designer- and Marco Martinelli -playwright and director- founded the Teatro delle Albe (1983) and share its artistic direction.
For her original itinerary of vocal research, Ermanna Montanari has received acknowledgements in Italy and all over the world. She’s the founder and director - together with Enrico Pitozzi - of MALAGOLA, International Center for the Vocal and Sound Research, based in Ravenna (awarded with Premio Ubu 2022 for the Special Projects).
Marco Martinelli’s texts have been published and staged in ten languages, and he has been awarded with several prizes in Italy and all over the world. He is founder of the Teatro delle Albe’s non-school, a theatre-educational practice with adolescents, which has become a focal point for many scholars and which Martinelli has taken all over Italy and the world.
Luigi Ceccarelli, since the 1970s, has been dedicated to the composition of electro-acoustic music with special attention to sound space obtaining various prizes such as IMEB-Bourges, Ars Elettronica-Linz, the “Opus” prize from the “Conseil de la Musique du Quebec and in theatre Ubu Prize, Bitef Festival and Mess festival prizes.
Marco Olivieri sound designer collaborated with musicians and artists live and in the studio. He also works in the theatre field, realizing projects and researches on sound spatialization and the sonoriza- tion of unconventional spaces. Among the collaborations: Massive Attack, Scott Gibbons, Bob Wilson, Stefano Scodanibbio.
Simone Marzocchi musician, composer, teacher, first trumpet of the Orchestra Arcangelo Corelli of Ravenna, for over 10 years collaborates with Teatro delle Albe and he is active as a soloist with the projects “Solo” and “Sibode dj”.
“Seven pictures, marked by the beautiful music of Luigi Ceccarelli, performed on stage by Simone Marzocchi's trumpet: the absolute protagonist, Ermanna Montanari, in front of an abstract structure, gives voice in her way to a series of visions: poverty and wealth in the hands of a few, the invective on Italy, the world seen by a donkey... These are hyper-realistic pictures and other surreal ones, in Italian or the ancient dialect of Romagna, dominated by Ermanna Montanari in a state of grace, almost an orchestra with her voice on the microphone, tense and sharp, which from picture to picture also becomes a dancing body on the background of angelic figures by Giotto, between angelic prophecy and diabolic delirium. “
(Anna Bandettini, La Repubblica, Dec 18, 2019)
“Fedeli d’amore is a superb solo by Ermanna Montanari, who always seems to be growing nearer to actual singing. Martinelli’s text gives voice to real or imaginary figures that swarm about in the poet’s agonizing mind. What results is a highly personal expressive blend, in which words, sounds, images, her voice itself, her body - which at times is almost physically dissolved - are woven together and melt into one another, forming an inextricable whole.”
(Renato Palazzi, Il Sole 24 Ore, Dec. 22, 2019)
“Martinelli’s stage poem has an enormous illuminating force, and in its concise staging it seems to be able to move mountains. The worlds of sound and words created by Montanari, an extraordinary vocal acrobat, enthrall and frighten their listeners, instilling bliss, turmoil, uneasiness, and freedom. Last year, her astonishing vocal power earned her, once again, the Ubu prize for best actress.”
(Renate Klett, Theater der Zeit, March 2019)
“The text by playwright and director Marco Martinelli imagines the last moments in the life of Dante, shamed and exiled, as they reverberate through time to the present, with diverse languages folding one into another in the innumerable and astonishing voices of actress Ermanna Montanari and the music of Luigi Ceccarelli. The performance is a sort of spoken-word cantata in which political and metaphysical reality, spirituality, and carnality take on voice to embody the aura of a poet driven from the home city that sentenced him to be burnt at stake, condemning him to die a refugee. “
(Santiago Giordano, Pagina 12, October 2022)
