LUNARIA, final performance of the multidisciplinary artistic residency, as part of ItArts, premiered in L’Aquila.
Lunaria is a multidisciplinary art residency that weaves music, dance, visual arts and electronics around the theme of the Moon. The project stems from the desire to reread and reinterpret in a contemporary and electronic key the classic Italian repertoire that features the moon, a universal symbol of mystery, melancholy, transformation and introspection.
Through a contemporary ensemble and a collective of musicians, visual artists and dancers, Lunaria brings to life an immersive experience in which past and present constantly dialogue, as well as body and sound, light and shadow. The residency takes the form of a workshop of shared creation, in which artistic languages contaminate and transform each other.
The project is conceived by Stefano Mastruzzi, Artistic Director, and Nicolò Bernini, Executive Producer, for Saint Louis College of Music and is part of the ItArts Project, (Scientific Head, Daniela Macchione and Project Manager, Claudio Di Massimantonio), promoted by the Conservatory of Music “Alfredo Casella, whose aim is the international promotion of Italian Cultural Heritage, a treasure trove of knowledge understood both as a tradition inherited from the past and as a performing practice of contemporary arts.
Within Lunaria‘s workshop, young artists have the rare opportunity to suspend time, devoting themselves to a deep and collective creative process aimed at creating an original multidisciplinary work. In a cultural and social context that demands constant speed and performance, Lunaria asserts itself as a poetic and political act: slowing down. The workshop becomes a protected space, out of the rhythm of the world, where confrontation with the classical repertoire with reworking in an electronic key is also transformed into a confrontation with oneself. Each artist brings with them fragments, doubts, tensions and memories; the collective work thus becomes a form of recomposition and listening.
The entire creative process is followed and documented by a professional crew. From the artistic residency will come a documentary, produced by Saint Louis College Of Music in co-production with the Alfredo Casella Conservatory of Music, which will tell the story of Lunaria as a place of research, vulnerability and transformation, restoring the human and artistic complexity that runs through the project. Lunaria is not only an artistic residency, but an immersive experience that invites to rediscover the value of time, care and shared creation, under the eternal and changing sign of the moon.
The date is Sunday, Feb. 08, at 6:30 p.m., at the “Alfredo Casella” Conservatory of Music in L’Aquila, where a musical performance about a symbolic trip to the moon will be staged.
The musical journey takes the form of an inner ascent: a path of elevation and reconciliation of the soul with itself. The lunar journey thus becomes a metaphor for a journey within oneself, a detachment from earthly chaos, followed by a return to the earthly dimension enriched by a new awareness.
Each piece represents a stage in this emotional and spiritual journey. The musical prologue of original electronic music evokes the disorder and turmoil of the reality one wishes to abandon (suffocation); Claudio Monteverdi’s Madrigal “Hor che ‘l ciel e la terra e ‘l vento tace” marks the moment of detachment from the earth and departure to the moon. With Ennio Morricone’s The Crisis, the anticipation of arrival takes shape, while Luigi Dalla Piccola ‘s Piccola Musica Notturna represents landing and confrontation with fear. This is followed by the Nocturne by Ennio Morricone “Nocturne With No Moon,” which tells of self-exploration and the crossing of an inner crack. “Casta Diva” from Vincenzo Bellini’s opera “Norma” becomes a moment of coming to terms and reconciliation with one’s self. Finally, Ottorino Respighi’s Il Notturno accompanies the return: a return to earth transformed, in a new guise of maturity and awareness.
“Lunaria is an inner landscape and an outer space with unknown coordinates where bodies vibrate in a hypnotic dance, hands touch strings without emitting sound, eyes gaze raptly at the Earth, Lunaria as a Leopardian desire that cannot find its object; therefore, it creates it,” commented Stefano Mastruzzi, Artistic Director. “Art as asceticism, moody experience of secular nirvana, fragile and luminous; the very instant you observe it, its wavelength collapses, the dream crystallizes, you return to Earth, changed, sure, a little different, and on your face moon dust to remind us where we have been.”
