"Anima di legno " 2007

Anima di legno (Wooden Soul) - 2007

A work loosely based on The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi.

Music by Nik Comoglio

A brief presentation

The most beautiful idea among the many beautiful ideas woven together inThe Adventures of Pinocchio appears in the first lines of the book. From deep inside the simple piece of firewood which has arrived in Geppetto’s workshop from who knows where (in the Italian story, Geppetto is called ‘maestro Ciliegia’, or ‘Master Cherrywood’), pipes up “a soft, tiny voice”, which moans with pain or laughs when tickled.

Where does this voice enclosed in the wood come from? Who is this blythe spirit, this irreverent and disrespectful elf who wanders behind the scenes of the world?

We don’t know how to answer that question. Only one thing is certain: Pinocchio lives and has a personality even before Geppetto begins to sculpt him or gives him a name.

Without ever having set foot on earth, he possesses a sure knowledge of our world: he knows what work and wandering, childhood and old age are; which flattering remarks can move a man’s heart to pity; how to cook an egg and peel a pear.

So no reader is surprised if all the characters – the puppetmaster Mangiafuoco, the Cat and the Fox, Lampwick (in Italian, Lucignolo), etc. – know him without having ever met him; as if a secret complicity, or information from an unidentifiable source, were pushing them towards the very heart of their book. In the best romantic tradition of children’s literature, Pinocchio is the hero of a story without pity: overflowing with frustrating alienation; injustice; terror; menacing, blackmailing, punishing magic; nightmares and death. Everything – even that little voice coming from the piece of wood – is divine, mystical in its impulsivity and risk, sacred in its mockery and passion.

It seemed clear to us that a symbolic reading in this sense was necessary, because it really seems that in The Adventures of Pinocchio, nothing happens by chance: the Cricket, the Fox, the Cat, the Serpent, the Dove – habitual and very common inhabitants of the Tuscan countryside – regain their value as symbolic archetypes; Nature is more than nature and the colors are anything but splotches between the lines of the book; the Sea, primal source of all being, marks one of the great rites of passage of the puppet in search of Truth; the number four crops up almost obsessively, and so on…

The work “Anima di Legno” (“Soul of Wood”) begins from these presuppositions, seeking to delineate, as much as possible, this symbolic reading of Collodi’s tale, placing at centerstage not a wooden puppet (Pinocchio) but a wood sprite, a spirit of the forest, pure and virginal, called, fittingly, ‘Anima di Legno’ (‘Wooden Soul).

He is Nature’s messenger, sent by other forest spirits (or “genies” of the trees, to use Buzzati’s term) into the world, into a reality interwoven with symbolism, to examine it, study it and understand it – and sometimes to rebuke it, as well (ecological repercussions)… All the characters revolve around this new ‘Puck’, who seems to be struggling to acquire his own perspective, his own personality, not to be simply alive, but alive-in-a-role.

The poverty-stricken reality of agricultural Tuscany in the late 1800s – crowded withirascible old men, unscrupulous innkeepers, cruel carabineers, smarmy swindlers and cheats – is visited by an apparition: the immortal Lady of the Animals, the Queen of Metamorphosis: the Fairy. She weaves together destinies and arranges adventures, all the while hiding and transforming herself.

In the same way, our protagonist, born under the sign of the Queen of Metamorphosis, must transform himself; his adventures, rather erratic up to this point, begin to take on the outlines of an initiation – the realization that he can abandon his spirit state and become fully human.

But Anima di Legno, ‘Wooden Soul’,cannot be and doesn’t want to be anyone but himself: this will be the only response to his final and unexpected choice to return forever to the source, to Nature, finally rediscovering himself to be the soul and driving force of an extremely important – and above all symbolic, fundamental and vital – role for mankind: that of being the heart of a tree.

NIK COMOGLIO

Characters

Anima di Legno (Wooden Soul) – non-operatic male voice
The puppetmaster Mangiafuoco – bass
The Cat - baritone
The Fox - soprano
The Fairy - soprano
The Dove - baritone
Lampwick (Lucignolo) – mezzo soprano

CHORUS

Instrumentation :

Orchestra, chorus and percussion instruments + jazz octet

Listening Tracks

"Tarot" La spirale del tempo- 2005

Tarot - La spirale del tempo (Tarot –The Spiral of Time) - 2005

A short suite based on the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot for:

soprano, baritone,

contemporary ballet

piano, small orchestra, chorus and percussion instruments

Lyrics by Rodolfo Brun

Music by Nik Comoglio

Much has been written about the Major Arcana of the Tarot, but even today the mystery of their origins in place and time and their symbolic meaning have yet to be revealed. Whatever their language is, it speaks to the deepest dimensions of the psyche and the spirit, it is linked to the world of archetypes, to the collective unconscious.

The Major Arcana of the Tarot have no need of interpretation; they speak to whoever desires to get in touch with their messages, showing us a path of awareness and personal growth which begins in chaos and ends in the core of being.

We decided to represent this journey inward and in the world by creating a short work that unwinds like a spiral on different levels: music, singing, dancing, lyrics, choreography, theatricality. Our intent is to conduct the audience member along a path rich in stimuli that will put him in touch with its symbolic universe.

The Tarot sinks its roots in a long-ago past and is the depository of our traditions; it contains the representation of the world and its forces that reveal themselves in the cards: life and death, the cycle of the seasons, love and passion, wisdom and folly, cosmic cycles, universal forces, matter and spirit, the action of opposites… This is a conceptually varied and intense work, both for its theme and for the complexity of its score.

According to tradition, ancient knowledge was concealed in the Tarot in order to hand it down secretly and safely through the centuries, from generation to generation, from civilization to civilization, hidden in a game of chance; we have dealt with this mystery through a theatrical performance that is simultaneously ritual, game, magical act, dream and participation in order to create a more immediate convocation of the Here and Now.

Running time: approximately 140 minutes.

The writers/composers

Se c'e' Solo l' Amore - 1996

Se c'e' Solo l' Amore ( “Quand on n'a que l'amour”) 1996

Reconstructing the life of Jacques Brel from his early childhood to his death in the Marquesas Islands is at the heart of this complex but fascinating theatrical/musical project. Starting from the concept of the ‘sung word’, so dear to Brel (but also to Duilio del Prete and the whole entourage of Italian singer/songwriters trained in the wake of that great French chansonnier for whom music was always: “handmaiden and crutch to the word”), the performance presents a continuous flow of famous and not-so-famous songs to form an uninterrupted grand poetic fresco of the Belgian singer/songwriter.

From the first steps of the love songs to “Marike” or “Le plat pays”, through the turbulent passion of “Madelein” or “Frida la blonde”, finally arriving at the introspective “Zangra” and “Ne me quitte pas”, and the denunciations of “Amsterdam” or “Les Bourgeois”, the CD carries us throughthe whole repertoire, with arrangements that ritualize the sound of these true masterpieces of an epoc, sung in Italian by Duilio del Prete, who is able to maintain all their strength and original pathos.