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Open-air

Born on Feasts' experiences, conceived for audiences of thousand and thousand people, built for open spaces - exceeding the limits of surface and height -, consecrated by attending to some of the most important theatre festivals all over the world, Valerio Festi's Company and its performances develop an original and coherent idea of theatre.
They are recognizable for their cosmic subjects: telling about angels, celebrating the Fortune, listening to the planets, and letting the myth born again.
Those representations are in allegorical form, and are structured like a Concert for Elements. The language is made of strong symbols and unforgettable images, supported by high level texts and music, and also by didactics suggestions.
Their achievement depends on men whose profession is extraordinary: water jugglers, dancers hanging from the sky, magnificents scene-painters, heavenly voices and sounds, flying artists, air and fire's poets….
Those peculiar combinations let Valerio Festi's Company continuosly renew its performances' repertory, modifying their structures and creating projects, which are thought for events of different cities, or for particular needs of visibility and communication of big agencies.
In some theatrical occasion, performances run in a definite form, for example:
Fortune's Allegory - About Angels and Light - Cosmogony - Planets

Fortune's Allegory

Represented as a blind woman, with her winged foots on a wheel, instability's sign, holding a cornucopia in her hands- that means easy enrichments- or a rudder, with whom she steers men' fate, Fortune symbolizes feminine's nature, as water and moon.
Those are the essential elements of the performance: dancers on trapezes hung on big moving balls, choreographic movements on golden scenographical machines, pyrotechnical fires and self propelled stages, fanciful images filtered through water and armillary spheres full of light, like white comets hanging over the audience.
Especially created for the reopening of the homonymous historical theatre in Fano, it performed in several Italian towns (among others Trento, Brescia, Modena, Foligno) and abroad, in Bilbao and Reykjavik.

  
 
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About Angels and Light

Recently we hear lot of talking about angels: exhibitions, movies, meetings propose iconography, piety, philosophic reflection about their meaning and function.
In this performance "Light Beings" are the ones that lead us through the world of the Spirit, a world where desperately man wishes to be, the place he mostly misses, that in this performance talks to us using the flying language. Spheres' harmony on earth and in the sky, almost immaterial purity of figures dancing suspended on invisible threads, musical breath of light, upright walks that challenge gravity's law, all those are angels' prerogatives, and they appear according to their different categories: archangels, cherubs, seraphs, scanning the sight in three parts.
The performance had gorgeous representations in Santiago of Campostela, Madrid, Moscow's theatre's Olympiad, where it opened the section "All theatres of the World", in Bologna - European Capital for Culture 2000, in Bogotà and in Spoleto's Festival.



Cosmogony

Nature's celebration - especially its passage from a earth-centered view to a new conscience of the universe, dear to the seventeenth century's scene - still impassions quantum science, that keeps using the ancient myths' language to describe phenomena. Cosmogony is a performance based on these subjects: a story made of Renaissance and baroque's images, a representation of symbols and visions. The performance is played over our heads, with aerial fights and lights projected towards infinity, fire virtuosities and Terpsichore 's acrobatics over scenic machines that dominate the audience: different scenes that run in continuity, drawing a syncretic layout across the various cosmos' mythologies - from Hesiod's theogony to all Celtics and Arab-Norman interpretations.
Cosmogony has run Barcelona, Milan, Taormina, Naples, Istanbul, Hong Kong, and Oceans' Festival 1999 of Lisbon.

  
 
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Planets

Created for Spoleto's Festival, this performance is an outdoor version of "The Planets, op.32" , Gustav Theodore Holst's symphonic composition for Chorus and Orchestra.
Following the same division achieved by Holst himself, the performance "listens" to each planet's character and functions, from bellicose Mars to quiet Venus, to mystic Neptune, going through Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus.
The atmosphere is oneiric: planets' movements comply with moving scenes, where the choreographic actions and the concert' s elements take place. Fire, Water and Air, according to Valerio Festi' s Company point of view, give us back the feeling of exploring those incredible and yet close worlds, holders of peace and war, joy and illusion, wisdom and light.
After Spoleto, "Planets" has been represented in Valencia and Bilbao.


  
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