Furioso Orlando

STEFANO ACCORSI

in

FURIOSO ORLANDO 

A ballad in Ariostean rhyme for a narrating knight

tratto da l’Orlando Furioso di Ludovico Ariosto

adattamento teatrale MARCO BALIANI

original music

with

NINA SAVARY

set design

BRUNO BUONINCONTRI

costumes

ALESSANDRO LAI

lighting design

LUCA BARBATI

directed by

MARCO BALIANI

The show premiered at the Teatro Ventidio Basso in Ascoli Piceno on 4 February 2012. Turning Orlando Furioso into a stage presence is a feat worthy of knights errant – or rather knights narrant. Stefano Accorsi takes on the role of such a knight and grapples with Ariosto's work, riding the weighty theme of love in all its forms: love lost, unlucky, victorious, painful, suffering, sacrificial, joyful – and certainly furious too.

To keep up with the many tales of amorous feeling and their matching adventures, the narrating knight must take on shifting guises, be at once many faces and hearts, many voices and different bodies – sometimes female substance, sometimes magical, ghostly absence, or by contrast an unsettling presence.

Entering and leaving these presences, and above all following the phantasmagorical passion of his double Orlando, the knight Stefano will also lose his wits, and will have to search for them in those places of dreams of which, as we know, we wandering actors are made, like cloth.

The music accompanies this pilgrimage of love; far from becoming a servant knight in its turn, it forces the actor into duels and disputes, quarrels, setbacks and checkmates, as a very indiscreet presence embodied in living, playing musicians.

Monologando, narrando, melologando, digressionando, le rime ottave del grande poeta risuoneranno in sempre nuove sorprese, in voci to ascolto inaspettate, in suoni to orecchio stupiti.

They say that telling stories makes the world far less terrible, and for this task, in these bitter times when reality alone seems to speak, we set to work, with a light, airy step, but to touch lofty matters and sincere feeling.

Marco Baliani

Photographs are free of publication rights for press use. Please always credit the photographer: ph. Pino Le Pera

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