Rossini&Rossini

2023 – Playful, creative, magical, colourful, choleric, goliardic, escaping from the conventional… with the video-scenography of Rossini & Rossini, realised in collaboration with Carlo Cerri, OOOPStudio closes its 2023 theatre season by giving/displaying/showcasing  a vision of the settings for the dance performance directed by choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti for the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, with live orchestra and singers.

The projections realised for the two-part show are a completely new and modern interpretation of Rossini’s settings/scenarios/visual background/ambience / rossinian atmosphere, paying homage to the Italian composer Gioachino Rossini and his most famous works, skilfully mixing or alternating that dual identity of the maestro, as creative and unconventional as he is masterful in his execution. Led by this dualism, OOOPStudio proposes a visual that is as serious as it is playful, staging solemn architectures but also colourful, creative, kaleidoscopic settings, paying homage to Rossini’s creativity and the liveliness of his music. The video-scenography is inspired by the time when the musician lived and those places where his creative genius gave life to his most famous works, as to say the bourgeois contexts of the rich 19th century palaces and the picturesque Parisian, Bolognese and Neapolitan salons where evenings of music and dance were enjoyed, which stimulated the composer’s imagination but that he rejected at the same time. The resulting imagery was created thinking of the concept of contrast, inherent in Rossini’s personality as much as in his operas, which definitely broke with the previous musical tradition.

In the first part of the performance, OOOPStudio chooses images rich in movement and colour for a scenography that balances a rather composed and controlled choreography. The common thread of eclecticism accompanies the opening dance: the backdrop opens with a polychromatic virtual labyrinth, a kaleidoscope of incredibly colourful and luminous geometric windows that moves with the dance troupe. A sort of wall made up of multicoloured leaded glass windows, like an explosion of mottled splinters, moves across the background, giving the impression of wandering from room to room, from one party night to the next.

As the opera goes on, the setting becomes more serious, or simply more intimate, hidden, and silent, until it reaches the most rigorous scenarios that characterise the entire second part. The bright elements are abandoned to embrace more elegant and solemn ones, giving way to external visions of the imposing, clean and august architecture of neoclassical buildings. The images are more elemental and static, conceived in two colours as to suggest a nocturnal context, while the choreography appears more ironic, irreverent and playful. The dimensional play is possible thank to the light, the true protagonist of the entire second act: light is the dominant element both from a formal point of view, creating luminous geometric patterns – niches, arches, illuminated terraces, lit candle flames – and because it is functional, with its changes in intensity, to an illusionistic play of space and depth, revealing a swinging background, imposed or concealed, that emerges or retracts.

The whole projection is designed to recreate a theatre within a theatre. These dynamic wings have not been conceived just as an expansion of the stage or as a simple context, but as a new, modern, dynamic and virtual construction of the place chosen by Rossini to give expression to his work.