1995 – 1996 Chiaravalle AN
A theatre of possible possibilities

A soldier’s story

Libretto by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz
Opera composed by da Igor Stravinskij

Poetry and music meet and combine within this dynamic project through a work on the use of space and body motion techniques.
This work educates participants (groups of students aged 11 – 13) to collaborate, to manage a scenic space with no steady point or predetermined course, to improve one’s operating speed, but also to work with slow rhythms and to command micro motions to express dramatic or comic tension, to summon up more techniques in a unicum. Ramuz and Stravinskij’s work is an intense opera, full of meanings and signifiers, particularly suited for personal and artistic education and leaving enough space for rhythm variations in a context made up of music, word and gesture. The same is with the use of space – theatre physical and metaphorical space (a dedicated space) – which the young actors transform, as they go,  into a forest, a city, a street, hell. They’re bodies mastering the void.

Excerpt from the last scene – Reader: … You can’t have everything. “I’ve got everything, I’ve got everything”, thinks the soldier. But one day his wife tells him: “I don’t know anything about you, about your past.. so, tell me your story”. “Once I was a soldier, I lived together with my mother, in a faraway village to which I don’t remember the road”. “And what if we went there?”. “You know it’s forbidden”…
They set off, they’re about to get there, the soldier starts running.
And she, she lagged behind.

(The devil reappears).

CET Educational Centre for Theatre
Academic Year 1995 – 1996, Artistic Director: Mario Gallo

Educational Centre for Theatre