South

Opera in one act for voices, percussion, harmonic whirlies, hang, wind, and noises

  • Music by Mirto Baliani, John Dowland, Gérard Grisey, Alvin Lucier, Steve Reich, Iannis Xenakis
    Based on the theme of “Away to the South” (from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by F.L. Baum)
  • Production: Opera Futura Laboratori per un Nuovo Teatro Musicale, Teatro Comunale di Ferrara
  • co-produced with Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Teatro Comunale di Modena, Fondazione I Teatri di Reggio Emilia | with the contribution of Regione Emilia Romagna, Department of Culture, Sport, and Youth Project, and Ministry of Youth, within the framework of the GECO – Giovani Evoluti e Consapevoli Program Agreement | in collaboration with Les Brigittines (Brussels), Music Biennale Zagreb (Zagreb)
  • conceived by Luigi De Angelis and Chiara Lagani
  • direction, set, lighting by Luigi De Angelis
  • dramaturgy by Chiara Lagani
  • text for Dorothy by Chiara Lagani featuring Fiorenza Menni
  • sound design by Mirto Baliani
  • costumes by Chiara Lagani and Sofia Vannini | with Fiorenza Menni | and with Mauro Milone and Davide Sacco
  • percussion by Nextime Ensemble (Danilo Grassi, Lisa Bartolini, Antonio Somma, Federico Zammarini), Mirto Baliani
  • noises and voices by Fiorenza Menni, Mauro Milone, Davide Sacco
  • vocal ensemble Melodi Cantores (singing and direction by Elena Sartori, alto Roberta Guidi, tenor Sergio Martella, bass Decio Biavati)
  • set design by Nicola Fagnani (Atelier OperaOvunque)
  • set realization by Atelier OperaOvunque with Giovanni Cavalcoli, Marco Cavalcoli, Nicola Fagnani, Marco Parollo, Amir Sharif-pour
  • set design assistants Alessio Alonne, Chiara Castello, Francesca De Gobbi
  • tailoring by Laura Graziani Alta Moda and Marta Benini with Sofia Vannini
  • portrait of Oz by Zapruderfilmmakersgroup | echo sonar by Umberto Biagini
  • production assistant Marian Vanzetto | production office Ifat Nesher for Canvas Management with Marco Cavalcoli
  • promotion by Valentina Ciampi, Marco Molduzzi, and Ifat Nesher
  • office of looks by Lorenzo Donati
  • logistics by Sergio Carioli
  • administration by Marco Cavalcoli and Debora Pazienza
  • special thanks to Laura Barenghi, Simone Caputo, Marko Delic, Andrea Di Cioccio, Tomas Kutinjac, Franco Masotti, Massimo Paci
  • special thanks to Caterina Marrone and Rodolfo Sacchettini | Opera Futura Laboratori per un Nuovo Teatro Musicale is a project conceived and coordinated by Giordano Montecchi

Year : 2009

“South” is a musical work, the new production that fits into the multi-year project Fanny & Alexander has dedicated to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum.

After Dorothy. Sconcerto per Oz, where the emblematic cyclone, the famous one from the Wizard’s story, became a generative figure for a new model of musical opera – inspired by Cage’s Europeras – blending multiple sound layers into one unified presence, South aims to continue and radicalize this same line of research, also using the live presence of musicians (percussionists and singers) and actors.

The protagonist, Dorothy, a sort of avatar for the audience in this journey through the world of Oz, abandoned by the Wizard who cannot fulfill her wish of returning home, decides to go South, where Glinda, the witch of that realm, may be able to help. This is an allusive, mysterious place or wind, difficult to define: it seems to be a simple theater, or a strange room where something awaits under the immobile gaze of the Wizard’s effigy; soon, however, it transforms into a truly autonomous universe, an organ-like place of a more complex body in which every single sign, every visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory trace becomes a new gradient of the overall temperature and the fundamental request Dorothy expresses with her journey and passage.
South will plunge Dorothy, and with her, the audience, into a dark night, a percussive and swirling darkness, from which a new language will emerge, the rhythmic language of the beat, the lunar, animalistic, and nocturnal language of the Witch of that wind, a creature perhaps born from that sound world in which Dorothy has immersed herself and transformed.

The project aims to revisit and reconsider the rhetorical mechanisms of musical opera in the context of a re-reading of a key myth in Western literature, drawing from a varied contemporary repertoire that is revisited in function of the new sonic organism being created layer by layer.

Fanny & Alexander’s research is carried out by an expanded team, in collaboration with other artists such as the theater group Teatrino Clandestino and the musical ensembles Melodi Cantores and Nextime, the OperaOvunque set design workshop, Canvas Management agency, with the goal of a dynamic redefinition of the constitutive elements of a musical production.