Name: ALI
Start: 2023-02-11T17:30:00+01:00
End: 2023-02-11T18:30:00+01:00
Location: Fonderia

Ali – La Ribalta – ph. Andreas Marini

Ali, from texts by Antonio Viganò, Remo Rostagno and Gian Luigi Gherzi, is a creation that stages the encounter between a young man and an angel to tell of confronting identities, mutually unveiled dimensions, impossible challenge between the human and the celestial. The two young performers of the La Ribalta – Kunst der Vielfalt company, Jason De Majo and Michael Untertrifaller, bring to the stage a spectrum of brutal and at the same time tender sensations, capable of creating an infinite range of expressive coloring.

Two perfomances:

Saturday, February 11, 5:30 p.m.
Sunday, February 12, 5:30 p.m.

CREDITS

Text by Gianluigi Gherzi, Remo Rostagno, Antonio Viganò
Directed by Antonio Viganò
Choreography by Julie Anne Stanzak (Tanztheater Wuppertal)
Production direction Paola Guerra
With Michael Untertrifaller and Jason De Majo

Inspired by the 1993 show ALI, a co-production Le Grand Bleu and Teatro La Ribalta

(PremioETIstregagatto 1995).

A production Teatro La Ribalta-Kunst der Vielfalt – Lebenshilfe Südtirol

A tribute to Joseph Scicluna

CONCEPT

Ali is the story of an encounter between an ordinary young man, somewhat disillusioned and pessimistic, and an individual with two red wounds on his shoulders, a fallen angel who is willing to suffer and love as all human beings do. The creature, descended from heaven through a light pole, asks, questions, wants to understand the why of everything. It is as curious and naive as a child.

A web of mutual questioning, curiosity, and conflict is established between the two, causing the angel to discover feelings and sensations he has never experienced before.

The angel and the man meet, clash, struggle, recognize each other, grapple and brush against each other in a dance of life until death. Uncovering memories buried under piles of stones, the angel lays bare man’s life, his sorrows and joys.

Why do you touch where it hurts? Man asks.

The struggle between the two becomes as hard as a game. A cruel and poetic game in which man discovers his uniqueness, his being a unique and unrepeatable “story,” while the angel will have to choose between being everything and nothing or a precise, earthly identity by giving up his divine dimension.

I have no stories

It is not possible. Everyone has one! Everybody!

No, I don’t have stories…no, no. I have one. Just one. This one. (Opens a suitcase of feathers).

And this is your story?

It is my story: sky, air, flying….

I would like to be like you: one suitcase, light. I would like to be like you.

We have illustrious masters to guide us: Rilke with his “Elegie Duinesi”, Peter Handke and Wim Wenders with “Heaven Above Berlin”, Wallace Stevens’ “The Necessary Angel”, James Stephens’ “Semidei”, and Walter Benjamin’s “Angelus Novus”.

TEATRO LA RIBALTA

Teatro La Ribalta – Kunst der Vielfalt is a community of dancers and actors-versus-actors who want to develop their own legitimate strangeness. Live performance workers who are extraordinary solely and uniquely in their way of being on stage and for the professionalism they have chosen to practice.

Daily, doggedly, they work to seek and unveil ” beauty ” and try to give it back, to those who meet them, through poetry and the art of theater. Men and women who like the idea that the boundary between reality and fiction is penetrable, that fantasies and desires can become material, that work subjects and practices become opportunities to live and dream, that a person in difficulty can become the protagonist of his or her own life, when he or she crosses boundaries, changes the everyday, navigates unexplored waters, reconstructs identities. They bring to the theater a mystery, a personal poetics, the shadows and wounds that nourish art and life. They are aware that only through quality artistic practice and a deep work ethic can they defeat prejudices, change paradigms, make people think and move. That is why their theater is a political act.

The company, founded in Bolzano in 2011, has a repertoire of shows (The Sound of Falling, Characters, Nobody Knows About Us, The Dance, H+G, Wings, Superable, Othello Circus, A Peep Show for Cinderella, Paradise Lost) that are touring Italy and Europe and contributing a new look and artistic depth to social art theater.

Winner of the 2015 and 2018 Eolo Award for the shows “H+G” and “Superabile” as the best new productions of the year in the childhood and youth theater sector; the 2015 Critic’s Award promoted by the National Association of Theater Critics as well as the 2018 UBU Special Award “for the quality of artistic, creative and political research in often marginal areas and with capillary attention to diversity ” and Hystrio Award – Other Muses 2021 “for making theater practice an instrument of social inclusion at 360 degrees.”