Parma and Reggio Emilia theaters become dreamlike spaces with Yuval Avital's Mostrario

Parma ’s Teatro Regio and Teatro Due and Reggio Emilia ’s Teatro Municipale Valli will be transformed into dreamlike, exhibition spaces for the final chapter of Yuval Avital ’s The Bestiary of the Land (Jerusalem, 1977), the Reggio Parma Festival’s project of the year. In fact, from Nov. 18 to Dec. 11, 2022, the three weekends of Yuval Avital’s Mostrario, the massive three-part multidisciplinary work involving the main theaters of the two cities, from foyer to stage, with live performances, installations, sculptures, sound and large-scale works, will take place.

Thanks to the choral work of the theaters, with the involvement of all the craftsmen and many creative realities of the territories, there will be an opportunity for a special experience up close and personal with actors, dancers, singers, musicians and puppeteers working together to bring a true poetic act to life. A fantastic exploration in constant flux of the founding themes of the relationship between human beings and animals: themes that have characterized the entire project of The Bestiary of the Earth. In fact, The Bestiary is the final chapter of the impressive meta-opera created by Avital.

Moving freely to discover the deepest soul of the theaters, with the opportunity to access even environments usually not open to the public, visitors will be able to participate in anever-before-seen experience consisting of live performances with international singers and musicians, installations, sculptures, sounds and large-scale works designed and created especially by the artist. Each Mostrario is different from the others; it is an experience unto itself and a subjective journey, in which each person experiences in his or her own way the profound relationship between Avital’s art and the spaces that host it: the environments of the theaters, from the foyer to the stage, thus come to life in an unexpected way, and the audience will be able to enter and leave freely, choosing their own path through the Mostrario.

During the three weekends, the spaces of theaters in Parma and Reggio Emilia will become the site of the journey among creatures and stories that populate The Bestiary of the Earth, in a reversal of roles and subversion of patterns. The study of the symbology of medieval bestiaries has led the artist to create a collection of eighteen bestial scenes, never-before-seen settings that intend to rework traditional iconography in a contemporary key, generating a living and relational laboratory to discover the animal nature inherent in the human one. Within each scene, imagined and represented by the artist, everything speaks: each creature is embedded in a universe of signs and meaning, it is not static but dialogues with the space it creates and inhabits. Anthropomorphic figures, animals and hybrid beings between human and animal, come to life as if catapulted inside theaters from a dream world.

At the Teatro Regio in Parma (Nov. 18, 19 and 20), six scenes will come to life, animating the halls and stage in a free path. Welcoming the audience will be the Sirens, mythical luring women who in Avital’s Mostrario become victims of grooming to give voice to women exploited by the prostitution trade. The salamander, an amphibian that resists fire and a symbol of self-control and purity, is dedicated to a feature film shot in Salsomaggiore, on whose civic coat of arms it stands, with the involvement of numerous citizens. In the Sciapodi disco, one-footed humanoids dance along with visitors in a silent disco, while a piano makes a melody composed by Yuval Avital resonate in the air. Flutes and glittering glass will create the suggestion of a chorus of birds joining a flock of winged monsters in a powerful meeting-clash of opposites, while the stage will be dominated by the giant Argos whose enormous figure will be composed of the eyes of all those who, responding to the Theater’s call, will lend their gaze to the mythical monster who thus becomes contemporary, a mirror of the bewilderment of our time.

At Teatro Due in Parma (Dec. 2, 3 and 4) new living creatures will be born from different theatrical forms, in synergy with the multiple disciplines involved by Avital. Audiences will be able to meet some mythical monsters rooted in the collective imagination, such as Medusa or The Bogeyman, and meet new ones. A class of little devils, made and performed by the puppets and puppeteers of the Fondazione Famiglia Sarzi, will show the wicked mechanisms of bullying a helpless scapegoat. It will be a stunned Jewish clown, actor Ivan Zerbinati, who will recount the origins of the Golem, leading, along with musicians and dancers, the performance that starting with the clay giant, shaped to protect the Jewish people, again proposes the question that dominates the entire journey: who is the monster?

The seven scenes at the Valli Municipal Theater in Reggio Emilia (Dec. 10 and 11) will be characterized by the singularity of the route, which accentuates perhaps the most perturbing dimensions of the Mostrario. In fact, this touches on rather unusual spaces, such as the dungeons and galleries of the stage alcove, establishes situations of deep immersiveness, makes use of technologies in the production of images and sounds. All emphasizing with non-human components and detournements the constant question that can become: who is who?

Among the live scenes, The Field of Mandrakes features sopranos Monica Benvenuti and Silvia Pepe: screaming mandrakes torn from the earth that generated them and images of hybrid monsters generated by artificial intelligence. The Plush City, with eight dancers from Michele Merola Contemporary Dance Company’s Agora as a place of disturbing ambiguity under the tender appearance of puppets. The same company is in the icono-sound installation The Hall of the Viper and Giant Worms, as vertiginous as a pit plunging from heights to depths of abyss. The Dragonflies and Water Lilies, spindly exhausted fairy figures contrasted with the mendacious persuasiveness of a digital avatar. The Secret Rabbit Garden, a happy island troubled by enigmatic presences. The Traveling Mice. The Sound World of a Porcile...

A journey into the imagination of an artist capable of probing the connections between the human and animal worlds, in a continuous symbolic cross-reference that oscillates between fascination and awe: the Mostrario, in its three different parts, stands as the conclusion of the path desired by Reggio Parma Festival, which, in different and complementary stages, has accompanied the public to discover the possibilities and limits of humanity.

For info: www.reggioparmafestival.it

Parma and Reggio Emilia theaters become dreamlike spaces with Yuval Avital's Mostrario

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