DITTICO BUFFO NAPOLETANO
Scenography
Taking part in creating DITTICO BUFFO NAPOLETANO was the most exciting opportunity for us to bring our illustrated surreal and playful world to the theater. And precisely "play" was the word used by director Marco Castagnoli to introduce us to these two stories, to these two interludes from the theater of the 1700s imbued with an irony that, while teetering on the edge of the absurd, is clamorously attached to the facts of timeless everyday life.
Colors and objects drawn were our tools to bring to life the most significant game we have ever played...quite literally! A crazy space of stage action, an obstacle course for ambitious, crafty, and lovelorn adults, a challenging terrain on which we move forward by rolling dice made of cunning and desires. It was incredible to develop the illustrated project of Neapolitan Diptyque Buffo together with the creative team because each one was able to give us dozens of suggestions and semantic nuances of a dramaturgy in constant flux, allowing us to arrive at the not-easy identification of those color tones and shapes necessary to drag the audience into a fantastic visual and dreamlike adventure, as well as auditory.
For Dittico Buffo Napoletano, Imaginarium created the illustrations for the playbill and set design of Maestro di Musica. Two lines about this baroque appointment, produced by the Teatro Verdi of Pisa, directed by Marco Castagnoli, conducted by Maestro Carlo Ipata, general scenic design by Alejandro Contreras and costumes by Cristina Ricci: these are two enchanting productions related to 18th-century Naples.
La vedova ingegnosa consists of two intermezzos that Giuseppe Sellitti, an operatic Neapolitan chapel master who, at 35, could already boast of two major debuts, composed in 1735 to a libretto by Tommaso Mariani. Rich in references to the commedia dell'arte, devoid of moralizing and with a hint of amusedly light taste for parody and the grotesque, it centers on two characters, the young and witty widow Drusilla, and Strabone, a fearful, very wealthy medicastro whom Drusilla is desperate to impale.
Certainly better known is the second title, Il Maestro di Musica, a pastiche attributed to Pergolesi, an intermezzo for music in two acts, comic in nature, composed to a libretto by Antonio Palomba and based on Orazio, an opera that Pietro Auletta had performed in Naples in 1737. Centering on three characters (an impresario, a singing master, and his ward) and the classic love triangle, Il Maestro di Musica was staged, for the first time, in Paris on September 19, 1752, by the Compagnia di Eustachio Bambini which had already aroused wide acclaim at the Opéra by performing, by Pergolesi himself, La serva padrona, and which with Il Maestro di Musica itself kicked off the famous "querelle des bouffons."
SET DESIGN OF MAESTRO DI MUSICA BY IMAGINARIUM
LO SPOT
IL MAESTRO DI MUSICA IN OPERATRIP!