Commedia

(…) Thus was born in us the taste for metamorphosis without which there is neither poetry nor art. Jean-Louis Barrault
The show presents three musical works around the theme of Commedia dell’arte.

The two musicians, Simone Beneventi percussionist and singer Andreas Fischer, perform alternately a solo work then meet for a common room.

1. “Zanni” for marimba and electronics, is a reverie on the characters of the Commedia dell’arte. Pantalone, Arlecchino, Briguella, Capitano invade the space of the marimba, transforming it into a small imaginary and poetic theater. Zanni is the first person from Veneto in the sixteenth century, as well as the various comrades who followed him – Arlecchino, Pantalone, Brighella, Capitano and the others – give birth here to burlesque and fantasy skits that have as imaginary space and theatrical,  the marimba. Speakers hidden in the belly of the instrument broadcast prerecorded sounds of the marimba itself, multiplying it, deforming it creating the illusion of a percussionist with ten hands. This device can just as easily be heard all kinds of sound games: voice, firecrackers, shouting, accentuating some comic or poetic traits, transforming the marimba into a kind of little box to show, a traveling theater space, which is not unlike the “Sandouk el-Ferjé” (magic box or box wonders) that was found in Lebanon and its surroundings at the beginning of the last century and of which there were some traces in my childhood of the seventies. It was a box of marimba length with holes.

2. Scherzi di Carnaval for a multiplied singer. These coins inaugurate a cycle. The singer engages in a game with his doubles – sometimes his voice goes down in the low end, sometimes it goes up to the extreme high. With his great agility of tessitura between the extreme low and the falsetto, he takes in turn all the funny burlesque roles all coming from the popular tradition. Fun stories, traits pushed to the caricature.

3. Hans und Hans for percussion and voice, is a duet on a libretto written by the German author and director, Manfred Weiss. The Commedia who traveled across Europe, through Germany, found her Arlecchino in the character of Hans Wurst (literally John the sausage). Hans Wurst meets Hans Durst. One is always hungry, the other is always thirsty. These two characters, dominated by their desires and their emotions, speak, fight, tear each other apart, until they become one.