The Shadow of Dante

Co production Italy - Indonesia
Theatre and Dance performance, 2022

The project was born from a lremote collaboration with the Balinese artists Made Suteja, performer of Topeng, traditional masked dance typical of Bali, and Kadek Budi Setiawan, performer of Wayang Kulit, the classic shadow puppet theater, which in 2021 led to the creation of a 7-episode web series entitled VIDEODANTE # Indonesia, on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the death of the Preat poet. The Shadow of Dante brings part of this work to the stage through an innovative experimentation that combines video projections and shadow theater, and which creates the stage design of the opera, in which the performers Nicola Pianzola and Made Suteja narrate, through ritual actions and continuous changes of characters, sometimes in mask, at other times as pure shadows, the otherworldly journey of the Supreme Poet. The show explores different artistic languages: from masked dance to contemporary physical theater, from classical shadow theater to video art and experimental cinema, from traditional Indonesian music to electronic and contemporary music, to ferry the viewer into the evocative scenarios evoked by Dante during his journey. The multilingual text intertwines fragments of the Divine Comedy (Italian and Old English) with epic fragments of the Indonesian and Eastern literary tradition, building a bridge between two ancient cultures so rich in cultural traditions: the Italian and the Balinese.