Cinquesensi
Jun 2022
La scena dell'arte
Ferdinando Bruni and Antonio Marras are directors, actors, set designers, costume designers, and interpreters of a project inspiring them to engage with each other on the art scene every day. They also encounter each other here, in Il teatro segreto, using a variety of media ranging from the traditional painter’s palette to reciting voices, from direction to the written word, from video to photography to create a production that is, in just a glance, both a narrative fiction and metaphor of existence. A story in chapters, a Russian doll of disclosures, a world of objects that have been unearthed, “stolen”, transported, brought to light, and re-arranged; a compact scenario introducing unexpected new discoveries to this dwelling.
We are in Villa Carlotta on the shores of Lake Como, a perfectly symmetrical neoclassical building with an Italian-style terraced garden sloping down to the lake. Curious fact: the first and last owners of the villa shared the same name: GEORGE II. The one responsible for building this complex, which was begun around 1690, was a certain Giorgio II (Clerici) known as Giorgione, an extremely powerful man who was the president of the Senate of Milan. While the other, who has no connection to the former, became the owner of the villa after marrying Charlotte, the daughter of Prince Albert of Prussia and Princess Marianne of the Netherlands, who was given the lakeside house as a gift from her mother. This George was the penultimate duke of Saxe-Meiningen and reigned from 1866 to 1914, the year of his death. He was a political protagonist of the times but mainly owed his fame to his role as promoter of the performing arts as well as to his work as a set designer, producer, director, and music patron, earning him the nickname ‘Theaterherzog’ or Theater Duke.
Georg II radically overhauled the rules of theatre direction, transforming the stage into a Gesamtkunstwerk (or “total artwork”). In 1870, he established his own theatre company, the Meiningen Ensemble. He toured the world for almost twenty years, developing many of the principles of modern set design and acting. He was responsible for the invention of a multilevel stage, the expedient of using realistic lighting on the sets, and the use of special effects to create the impression of a three-dimensional stage setting. These ingenious innovations introduced lasting changes to the language of theatre.
“The impact of the play no longer relied on the acting abilities of a single, more or less talented actor but on the overall artistic impact of an ensemble performance. The acting of the leading parts was not left up to the whim of the individual actors but coordinated in relation to the overall performance of the play: the same level of attention was also devoted to minor parts, to the gestures of the extras and their position on the stage. The duke, who was both sovereign and director, was uncompromising. He appointed as his stage director Ludwig Chronegk, a skilful organizer and experienced professional, who could be relied upon to faithfully execute his ideas but who was also involved in decision-making, finalizing every detail. Lines were rehearsed until the desired unity of tone and style of execution had been attained. If necessary, the rehearsals of a mise-en-scene could go on for months.” *
“The impact of the play no longer relied on the acting abilities of a single, more or less talented actor but on the overall artistic impact of an ensemble performance. The acting of the leading parts was not left up to the whim of the individual actors but coordinated in relation to the overall performance of the play: the same level of attention was also devoted to minor parts, to the gestures of the extras and their position on the stage. The duke, who was both sovereign and director, was uncompromising. He appointed as his stage director Ludwig Chronegk, a skilful organizer and experienced professional, who could be relied upon to faithfully execute his ideas but who was also involved in decision-making, finalizing every detail. Lines were rehearsed until the desired unity of tone and style of execution had been attained. If necessary, the rehearsals of a mise-en-scene could go on for months.” *
Georg II also hired an orchestra for his court theatre, offering the direction to composers such as Hans von Bülow, Richard Strauss, Wilhelm Berger, and Max Reger. The “intellectual” revolution brought about by Prince Georg in the world of theatre was so profound that his royal seat of Meiningen is still known today as the Theaterstadt (or “Theatre City”).
Under Georg II, the rules of acting were radically changed as were the role and position of the set paintings, which were no longer mere backdrops used to create a horizon line but interactive elements integral to the unified vision of the director. These radical innovations spread through Europe and then to the rest of the world. In Italy, however, “this new approach struggled to emerge due to the power of star actors”. From then on, theatre and its ancient rules were no longer the same. In fact, Konstantin Stanislavskij drew directly upon the “Meiningen principles” to develop his method and teaching, which were later continued by Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow and Lee Strasberg in New York, who taught this system to his students at the Actors Studio, who included a young Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro.
There is no trace of this extraordinary renewal at Villa Carlotta; not a scrap of backcloth, curtain or poster accompanies Bertel Thorvaldsen’s white marble statues.
Georg II became a widower when his first wife Charlotte died at the age of twenty-four, shortly after giving birth to their fourth child. A few days after this tragic event, the duke lost his second child who was just three years old. Although he would never recover from these losses, his creative commitments helped him to work through his grief. In fact, from that time on, the dazzling lakeside sanctuary that had come to him from his wife would remain unchanged. This place of primordial joy was to remain intact, concealing a secret that would only be revealed to his closest friends, like Johannes Brahms who would often accompany him on summer strolls along the avenues of the garden or on an occasional boat trip.
There is no trace of this extraordinary renewal at Villa Carlotta; not a scrap of backcloth, curtain or poster accompanies Bertel Thorvaldsen’s white marble statues.
Georg II became a widower when his first wife Charlotte died at the age of twenty-four, shortly after giving birth to their fourth child. A few days after this tragic event, the duke lost his second child who was just three years old. Although he would never recover from these losses, his creative commitments helped him to work through his grief. In fact, from that time on, the dazzling lakeside sanctuary that had come to him from his wife would remain unchanged. This place of primordial joy was to remain intact, concealing a secret that would only be revealed to his closest friends, like Johannes Brahms who would often accompany him on summer strolls along the avenues of the garden or on an occasional boat trip.
This secret was a theatre, which re-appears like an unexpected discovery, here in Villa Carlotta, the duke’s lakeside sanctuary, which remained uninhabited for many years, preserving its vast intangible heritage.
Repeating the programme launched in the final decades of the 19th century by the villa’s owner, the same man who dismantled sets, redesigned costumes, and canceled stage directions in an ambitious attempt to change the path of theatrical history required enough imagination and innovation to really shake things up, yet again breaking the rules of theatre. Antonio Marras and Ferdinando Bruni stepped forward to take up the challenge. They crossed the garden, climbed up to the top floor with its stunning view of the lake and then walked down the corridor until they reached a door on the left that had long been closed. Tip-toeing in, they whispered, “Slowly, slowly, sweet Charlotte”, awakening Charlotte, the mistress of the house. And as she reawoke, the spirit of the villa came back to life.
After reopening the windows on the top floor - from which Gian Battista Sommariva, the villa’s second owner, would observe his neighbours, the Melzi, at Bellagio - Ferdinando Bruni and Antonio Marras lit and reconstructed the gallery like a scenic cage, a perspective tunnel, a scenic Wunderkammer that would explain the world to Charlotte and show her where we are today: the bitter current affairs and ghosts of the past that sweep away the spectres and shades of a world that does not wish to change, always feeding off the same fears.
The room holds ten large canvases representing the present through symbols, in the words of Dickens or of Poe, rewritten by Ferdinando to remind us that the corvids are Thought and Memory that peck at our illusions like a “grim, ungainly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore.” Corvids are also evoked in Carlos Saura’s famous film (Cría Cuervos, 1976), whose title comes from a Spanish proverb reminding us “that if we fail to drive out the evil within, it will turn against us, that living in an eternal present made of selfishness and blindness leads to a future without light, that the dance of prejudice and ignorance is easy but lethal”. Bruni told me this, repeating it on numerous occasions, as he wrote those words on his canvases like a warning. His painted images are almost all backlit and their red backgrounds often feature a skeleton on top of a black sun with a corvid on its shoulder, “evoking the mortification, in its deepest sense, of being reduced to the bone of psychological truth”. Savage, surreal canvases less picturesque than the view from the window, lying beyond the garden. Great cedars stand out against the horizon of the lake and a corvid perched on one of the highest branches is focusing on something, seemingly observing life, unaware of the trap awaiting it, as in a famous painting by Pieter Bruegel.
But the observation point is always the same, the corridor on the top floor, where the two artists repropose the shadows of our time, compressed between apparent marks of chance, left like the burns caused by an over-hot iron and combined with sartorial remnants that are sewn together again and stretched across asymmetric folding screens, like a long wave of improvised portraits made to disappear. Mingling among the patches of abandoned leaves, Marras’ hands disappear behind the frames, as if they were supports for other icons, while he dips brushes into coffee dregs, mixing wine with lemon and then allowing a stream of ink to pour through the folds of a shirt collar peeping out from the frame of an old landscape, like an iceberg at the South Pole.
A toing-and-froing of moods, emotions, places, enchantments, sun, and burns, a godsend for Marras who fires up fantasies of manual skills inspired by Barceló, stolen from turners, taken from the sands, removed from furnaces, capable of welding earth to earth, or iron to iron, evoking aesthetic connections halfway between Egon Schiele and Julio González with his “Monsieur” Cactus. He opens and shuts wardrobes, doing so gracefully, moving between mannequins with the outlines of ladies and a neoclassical eye and tauromachy or red caparison fluttering over the screens, tipping out onto two tables the entire “interior condominium” that he brought with him.
The room holds ten large canvases representing the present through symbols, in the words of Dickens or of Poe, rewritten by Ferdinando to remind us that the corvids are Thought and Memory that peck at our illusions like a “grim, ungainly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore.” Corvids are also evoked in Carlos Saura’s famous film (Cría Cuervos, 1976), whose title comes from a Spanish proverb reminding us “that if we fail to drive out the evil within, it will turn against us, that living in an eternal present made of selfishness and blindness leads to a future without light, that the dance of prejudice and ignorance is easy but lethal”. Bruni told me this, repeating it on numerous occasions, as he wrote those words on his canvases like a warning. His painted images are almost all backlit and their red backgrounds often feature a skeleton on top of a black sun with a corvid on its shoulder, “evoking the mortification, in its deepest sense, of being reduced to the bone of psychological truth”. Savage, surreal canvases less picturesque than the view from the window, lying beyond the garden. Great cedars stand out against the horizon of the lake and a corvid perched on one of the highest branches is focusing on something, seemingly observing life, unaware of the trap awaiting it, as in a famous painting by Pieter Bruegel.
But the observation point is always the same, the corridor on the top floor, where the two artists repropose the shadows of our time, compressed between apparent marks of chance, left like the burns caused by an over-hot iron and combined with sartorial remnants that are sewn together again and stretched across asymmetric folding screens, like a long wave of improvised portraits made to disappear. Mingling among the patches of abandoned leaves, Marras’ hands disappear behind the frames, as if they were supports for other icons, while he dips brushes into coffee dregs, mixing wine with lemon and then allowing a stream of ink to pour through the folds of a shirt collar peeping out from the frame of an old landscape, like an iceberg at the South Pole.
A toing-and-froing of moods, emotions, places, enchantments, sun, and burns, a godsend for Marras who fires up fantasies of manual skills inspired by Barceló, stolen from turners, taken from the sands, removed from furnaces, capable of welding earth to earth, or iron to iron, evoking aesthetic connections halfway between Egon Schiele and Julio González with his “Monsieur” Cactus. He opens and shuts wardrobes, doing so gracefully, moving between mannequins with the outlines of ladies and a neoclassical eye and tauromachy or red caparison fluttering over the screens, tipping out onto two tables the entire “interior condominium” that he brought with him.
Bruni’s red caparisons are hung symmetrically along the “manica lunga” of the gallery, giving a semblance of order to this mise-en-scene, which would have strongly appealed to the duke. They are Bruni’s skies, or leaden streaks of lacustrian sunsets, giant red scrims with traces of spindrift clouds that envelop the corridor, a hymn to the garden where nature bursts out irrepressibly.
It is the beginning of the end, it is the vast art scene revealing its dichotomies: it is a dance, it is our time which shows Charlotte that some hopes may have been disappointed but that nothing is lost; there will be a future for nature if we are capable of accepting it. An eye observes from above, neither complicit nor assertive, neither black nor white; a polished ceramic billiard ball perched on a surrealist tree, left there by Marras like an opaque crystal ball, maybe as an encouragement not to delude ourselves, or maybe it is the duke’s eye,
why not? Ferdinando Bruni does not agree. He has brought his dresser from home to show us the difference between nature and fiction. It is a closet full of antique prints from which lacustrian “gorges” overflow, where not one, but thousands of eyes observe us like the leaves of an oak, where the dance has already been going on for centuries beyond repetitive red trees and even the garden of Villa Carlotta is an over-detailed engraving; a few touches of bluish-red send us back to the Mesozoic era of our imaginations, in a timeless scene where Marras’ grey ceramics sound like geese, rabbits, and chickens. It is an endless mise-en-scene, a counterpoint of human, animal, and vegetable nature that rises up from the villa garden into the gallery thanks to the fantasy of two great artists, restoring lustre to a history that belongs to us all.
It is the beginning of the end, it is the vast art scene revealing its dichotomies: it is a dance, it is our time which shows Charlotte that some hopes may have been disappointed but that nothing is lost; there will be a future for nature if we are capable of accepting it. An eye observes from above, neither complicit nor assertive, neither black nor white; a polished ceramic billiard ball perched on a surrealist tree, left there by Marras like an opaque crystal ball, maybe as an encouragement not to delude ourselves, or maybe it is the duke’s eye,
why not? Ferdinando Bruni does not agree. He has brought his dresser from home to show us the difference between nature and fiction. It is a closet full of antique prints from which lacustrian “gorges” overflow, where not one, but thousands of eyes observe us like the leaves of an oak, where the dance has already been going on for centuries beyond repetitive red trees and even the garden of Villa Carlotta is an over-detailed engraving; a few touches of bluish-red send us back to the Mesozoic era of our imaginations, in a timeless scene where Marras’ grey ceramics sound like geese, rabbits, and chickens. It is an endless mise-en-scene, a counterpoint of human, animal, and vegetable nature that rises up from the villa garden into the gallery thanks to the fantasy of two great artists, restoring lustre to a history that belongs to us all.
Il teatro segreto begins here, among the bedtime stories, among the papers, canvases, and drawings, the frames, ceramics, photographs, and animals. It may be interpreted as a radical homage to nature and to the history of modern theatre and its founders.
A necessary restitution reconnecting us to a possible present looking to an immediate future that may also be a little different, tirelessly sought beyond the constraints of the usual art channels and the false calls of an already obsolete daily life.
* Treccani.it, under the heading “Meiningen”.
A necessary restitution reconnecting us to a possible present looking to an immediate future that may also be a little different, tirelessly sought beyond the constraints of the usual art channels and the false calls of an already obsolete daily life.
* Treccani.it, under the heading “Meiningen”.