Od ombra od omo - Visions of Dante: The Divine Comedy is the core of this play, how do you wish to treat it?
When you enter the universe of Dante, you come out again utterly transformed from top to bottom.
The Divine Comedy, although written in the 14th century, is astoundingly modern and remarkably theatrical, we are face to face with a inexhaustible source of stories and reflections. Written at a time when the theatre had almost disappeared from the Western map, it speaks to us with crystal clearness, and with a strength of movement and of the word which anticipate painting, the stage, the cinema. It's a little as if Dante had reinvented the theatre in his own way, a theatre which contains the whole universe.

Mandelstam said that The Divine Comedy is a device for capturing the future. Our play takes place today, probes the terrain of the present, the clashes and the breakdowns of today's world. Dante, Mandelstam, Levi… what links are you making between these three writers?
We notice that Dante is someone with a fighting spirit, who loves to fence with words. Mandelstam, for whom poetry was a struggle for survival, chose Dante as his ally, like Primo Levi a little later.
Between them, there exists a coincidence. I had read that Mandelstam, at the end of his life, when he was interned in a gulag, used to recite poems, perhaps Dante, to his fellow prisoners to be given bread in return, and then I remembered If this is a man by Primo Levi, where he tells how he used to recite Dante with a young Ukrainian prisoner, reconstructing the verses of certain passages little by little. Thus, during the years of both the Stalinist and the Hitlerian dictatorships, these two men in comparable conditions remembered The Divine Comedy as a shining beacon and as a mirror of their own descent into Hell. It's only an anecdote, but it has remained very present for me.

Why did you particularly choose Interviews on Dante?
This text reveals The Divine Comedy in a new light. It transforms the discovery of Dante into a breathtaking adventure, intoxicating, incandescent. In general, we think of Hell, but there is also Purgatory and Paradise to discover. Other writers have always returned to The Divine Comedy to recharge their batteries, like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

Would you like to use fragments of different languages?
I would like to have Dante also heard in Italian, to reveal the originality of his poetry in his language. Music will play an essential role. Elena Kats-Chernin has created an original score for this production, her music is unclassifiable, contemporary and at the same time referring to other periods, for example the Renaissance. We will hear period instruments used by Monteverdi in his operas. Vincent Pavesi is a bass singer, for whom Elena has composed several arias on the texts of Dante.

© 2001 "Théâtre-contemporain.net".
Tous droits réservés.