Concept
Concept, Performance Cristina Papi
Concept, Music Ferrara Andrew
The performance Ofelie for solo interpreter, water and soundscape explores the psychological and mental contaminations among five important female shakespearian characters, converting and connecting their peculiar aspects in an undetermined continuum generating a sonic environment resulting in a real time musical score. Inspired by the humor theory (“choler, melancholy, phlegm, blood") reformulated by Ben Jonson and strongly present in the elisabethian theatre, the performance puts on stage through the interpretation of a performer the characters of Desdemona, Juliet, Cordelia and Lady Macbeth amplifying their peculiar features. Every one of them finds a novel form of espiation and re-birth experience in the never-completed water death of Ofelie. In more metaphorical terms, the four humors can be interpreted as consciousness autostates (in the quantum physics meaning), i.e. pure emotional states interacting ands self-assembling in the character of Ofelie, building up into more complex and undetermined psychological structures.
CORDELIA
Physical trace of the living score
The living score Ofelie extends for a temporal duration of about 20 min. The living score forma puts particular emphasis on the sonic interpretation of the transitions among different psychological autostates and on the interaction with the site-specific creation process. As such, the natural product of these actions is a unique musical composition which is strongly tied with the performing space and situation. The physical traces of the living score are imprinted on the multimedia documentation of the event (for which a limited and numbered edition will be available), thus acquiring the value of an artistic/musical signed work.
LADY MACBETH
Autostates of the narrative path
The narrative path is organized in a series of time transitions among the four autostates representing the humors. Each one of the above autostates crystallizes in the characters of Desdemona, Juliet, Cordelia and Lady Macbeth among which Ofelie oscillates under the impulse of an intermittent attraction. Every character is invested by a psychological archetypal role. In turn, we can recognize the following pairs: Obstinacy/Desdemona, Devotion/Juliet, Fidelity/Cordelia, Ambition/Lady Macbeth. Ofelie’s psycho-profile emerges in its complexity as a resultant of the superposition and interaction of such archetypes. The physical medium of Ofelie’s character is rooted in the water: such element comes back at different levels, as the sound, visual-sensorial and scenographic ones. In water, Ofelie exhales her last breath, killing the extremism of all human instincts. The sonic/visual identity of all other archetypes draws its reality from body, voice and concrete sounds which are in causal relationship with the performative action from which they originate.
STAGE
DESDEMONA
JULIET
