During the theater’s closure due to the Covid-19-related health emergency, memories brought it to life!
The Artistic Director of the Prose and Other Paths Season of the Fondazione Teatro Donizetti di Bergamo – Maria Grazia Panigada – has promoted the APERTI AI RICORDI campaign calling on the audience and actors, past guests of the Foundation, to share thoughts and memories related to the Theater and previous Seasons. An invitation to forward photos, videos, thoughts to remember the beautiful moments experienced together, the much-loved shows, the performers who most moved.
The memories of the actors
The memories of our audience
February 2017 – The magic, the enchantment, the light heartedness, the breath held in the wonder of an unforgettable show. “Slava’s Snowshow.” In these gloomy days it is a sweet and nostalgic memory
The chat with Lo Verso, the show and the kids’ attention at the matinee: a wonderful morning on a December Saturday “Uno nessuno centomila” with Enrico Lo Verso – Season 2018/2019
My picks from the last 4 seasons of the Fondazione Teatro Donizetti #vecchiricordi A showcase full of excitement!
One of the most poetic shows ever… This year on revival by the Centro Universitario Teatrale… “L’azzurro non si misura con la mente” – Season 1980/1981, opening performance of the first season of Other Paths.
The show is over. The echo of applause has died away. The stages and stalls are sadly empty. I turn to take one last look at these spaces that for a long time have allowed me to enjoy beautiful and unexpected sensations and emotions. The theater is empty, but when all the lights are turned off, the doors closed, the dimness, darkness and silence will be the very stuff of ghosts and spirits. They will remain here to preside along with the smells of woods, velvets and stage machinery, the ground for the new spaces and seasons of this place. I have had this good fortune: to witness in these last two years the preparation of a witness, beautiful, important that will be, as in a relay race, delivered to the new theater to fertilize the new spaces and the expectations of the lovers of this magic… “Quello che non ho” with Neri Marcorè – Season 2016/2017, the last show before the closing of the theater
In so many years of theater (I started the other century) many are the shows that have left their mark and aroused emotions that are still alive today. But thinking about recent seasons, I am reminded of: the magic of Slava’s Snowshow, Ermanna Montanari’s intensity in Maryam, Marco Martinelli’s superb theatrical proof that due to the protagonist’s sudden indisposition, he replaced her by reading the script of Aung San Suu Kyi’s Vita agli arresti. And finally the painful topicality of Lella Costa in Humans.
First movement Donizetti Theater 1992? The empty stage. No backstage. No backdrop. Exposed rigging. A huge stage. Naked. A chair in the center of the stage. Darkness. Light. In the chair is an actor we met a few months earlier. Final stage of Premio Scenario. We in Teatro Erbamil had rocked. We youngsters. With our cartwheels and our grotesque characters. Everybody laughed, a lot, and so did he, the actor I now saw moving in that little chair. Yes, he was nailed to that wood, but his body dressed in black, illuminated by a small cone of light, was beating, pawing, quivering getting bigger and disappearing. He was one, ten, a thousand. He was man, woman and horse. Emperor, warrior, servant and gypsy. Multitude and Solitude. I in a third row stolen in the dark, followed him spellbound. Eyes wide open. Eyes ablaze. Eyes of laughter and weeping. Of fury and tenderness. Kolhaas’ ardor and his questions about justice kept me there mesmerized in apnea. I remember my arms clutching outstretched, the empty chair in front of me. How was it possible that a little man sitting, alone filled that immense stage the whole audience and all hearts? Interlude Finished the show I went pushed by a friend to the artists’ exit. Tachycardia. The actor came out looked at me, smiled and said, “Erbamil? Bravissima” Second movement Donizetti Theater March 2016. I’m in front of the artists’ entrance. Yes. That one. I look at it. Soon I walk through it and find a dressing room with my name on it. Tachycardia. Cigarette and a furtive glance at the Sentierone. I am the first. I wait for my colleagues. Lighting rehearsal, aperitif at Balzer’s, and then we make our debut in Bergamo with Decamerone. The tour behind us is already long, but tonight we debut at home. In the theater of dreams. In the theater where as a little girl I saw Carmelo Bene, Vittorio Gassman, Mariangela Melato. I know it is sold out. I know that many friends and girlfriends are there in the stalls or boxes, crammed into the peanut gallery. And there are old and new loves and fellow travelers. Final My phone rings, it’s the director. Marco Baliani. That little man in black who held my breath on the stage of this theater that will welcome me tonight. The thoughts of Silvia Briozzo, an artist from Bergamo, linked to the Donizetti Theater interweaves the double role of spectator and actress, through her meeting with actor and director Marco Baliani Passion, awe, emotion intertwine in a poetic memory – Kohaas – Season of Other Paths 1991/1992 – Decameron – Prose Season 2015/2016
The first school-to-work alternation experience with the art high school…. to know and discover more, including what is behind the scenes. Immeasurable opportunity for students and also for me Paolo Rossi in Molière: la recita di Versailles – Season 2016/2017
The bare stage, a world created by movements, words and lights. The story is well known, but this almost puppet theater atmosphere makes it new, delicate, magical. Extreme physical rigor of the actors, a repetition of movements that together characterizes the characters and captivates the viewer. On leaving the theater one looks around and like others cannot help but feel moved, happy and deeply in love. Remembering “A Prince” Occhisulmondo – Season of Other Paths 2018/2019
If I can go back a bit in time I would go to Teatro Canzone Giorgio Gaber, and in particular to this one: I still remember the irrepressible laughter in my stage companions “E pensare che c’era il pensiero” – Season 1994/1995
I could write a book but of those with so many pages so many are the memories related to productions performed or shows seen. But I will put one photo that has a particularly sad memory for me, when I left the keys to the Theater before the restoration work began.
Amazing performance, she superlative. I was never a fan of poetry…she managed to convey great emotions to me with her verses…and made me appreciate precisely…poets… “Purple” with Mariangela Gualtieri and Stefano Battaglia – Season 2018/2019
Our viewer chooses to take us back to Orchids – Season 2014/2015. In the behind-the-scenes feature a shot of her stolen from leading man Pippo Delbono.
The red seats, the buzz of anticipation and the excitement of sharing words and sounds. Our theater. See you soon.
Cheese with artists Glauco Mauri (in “Finale di Partita”), Natalino Balasso (in “Arlecchino servitori di due padroni”), Giovanni Esposito (in “Regalo di Natale”) and three of the performers of “Il giardino dei ciliegi”: Lodovico Guenzi, Nicola Borghesi and Tamara Balducci. The best memories of this 2019/2020 Season shared with us by Noemi Belloli.
My mother began taking me to the theater in my middle school days. Over the years I have seen everything: monumental bricks and carved moments in memory, much Pirandello and the sublime “Madre Coraggio” played by Mariangela Melato. In my twenties I had the good fortune to immerse myself in the dimness of the Teatro Sociale before the albeit necessary restoration work. I am perhaps among the few people who nostalgically remember the atmosphere of that space suspended in time. Although I do not much appreciate this adjective, I cannot define otherwise than “magical” the feeling of being in that old ruined theater, just as magical has always seemed to me the instant when the hall lights go out and the walls of the Donizetti Theater are tinged a deep pink before it gets dark and the curtain rises. In the domestic segregation of these weeks, which causes one to think with bittersweet nostalgia about moments and faces of the past, I am reminded of certain intervals in the foyer and even the races to get a coffee before the bell. Creating rankings among the performances seen is always a very partial operation, marred by too many personal variables, and sometimes even unpleasant. Certainly, however, there are performances that stand out in the memory in a very special way, perhaps because they intersect a still open phase or question in our lives. Perhaps because they say the right word at the right time. Perhaps because, like a pin, they prick in the effective way and induce a healthy questioning of some stale category. There are many such works that I remember in recent seasons. “Antigone” actualized with a kind of 1920s Berlin fashion re-presented the dilemma of the tension between law and justice. I must admit here that I have a special admiration for Arianna Scommegna from the time I saw her in “Qui città di M” at ATIR Teatro Ringhiera di Milano. “Maryam” with Ermanna Montanari gave body to the tears I had not yet cried for my beloved Syria, for the people I knew in the Middle East and of whom, in some cases, I had no more news, for the pains, frustrations and aspirations of so many refugees and displaced people, Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians. In the prayers of those Marys, I felt in my veins the humanity that overrides the confessional, ethnic and national barriers with which we so often play at pigeonholing the world. By Montanari and Martinelli I remember “Va’ pensiero,” a bitter snapshot of the political, economic and moral disbandment of Italian society. I cannot forget “Amleto in Gerusalemme: Palestinian Kids Want to See the Sea” by Gabriele Vacis and Marco Paolini, Palestinian kids on stage, bottles lined up, bodies behind a white cloth. I cannot forget “Occident Express” with Ottavia Piccolo as Haifaa, with that heartbreaking ending. I cannot forget “Muri” with Giulia Lazzarini, with a glimpse of life in asylums before and after Franco Basaglia’s reform. I cannot forget “Lireta,” seen with an Albanian friend who had lived the same story narrated by the protagonist, making explicit the relationship between art and life that is at the very basis of theater; “Ivan,” directed by Serena Sinigaglia, also known from her days at Teatro Ringhiera; and again Elio De Capitani, so many times seen and appreciated at Teatro Elfo Puccini di Milano, in “Morte di un commesso viaggiatore.” As I look back on past seasons, I feel a sincere gratitude for the opportunity that these shows offer to each person who sees them: the opportunity for a different, more attentive look at the world around us, and the opportunity for a deeper look within ourselves, waiting for better times and new seasons.
Many are the memories of the shows experienced at Donizetti but the ones I still feel on me, on my skin, are the shows brought by Compagnia Finzi Pasca and Slava’s Snowshow, of which I still keep the white tissue paper confetti! But the most incredible thing is what happened to me in 2016. Maria Grazia Panigada called me and asked if I could tell stories at the Donizetti for Carnival. “O my God,” I thought, “a dream come true! Me, a simple storyteller at the Donizetti!?” Yes, that’s right. I think few artists have the honor of experiencing what I experienced and that is to tell stories for almost three hours, not on the Donizetti stage but on the RETRO PALCO! You know? Behind the stage, where only the stagehands work, the technicians. A hidden, magical, hard place. The perfect place for storytelling! And I still have evidence of what happened; Gianfranco Rota’s fantastic photos.
Marco Baliani foregrounding the stage in the finale of Corpo di Stato: “Yet we all came from the same needs for equality, for justice, we all came from the same great dream”? Toni Servillo in “Le voci di dentro” with his monologue on the decay of values (“You believed it possible. An assassination you put it in the family budget! The esteem, Don Pasquá, the mutual esteem that puts us right with our conscience, that makes us right with ourselves, we killed it…. And does that sound like a cheap murder to you? Without esteem you can get to murder”) of surprising relevance, thinking about the (dis)attention to the elderly these days. The chorality of Compagnia Finzi Pasca in “La verità” with the rain of colored balls falling from above and the dreams that can come true, if only for two hours, in a show?
Fortunately, there are many firsts in life. And fortunately my first time in the theater was many years ago, when I was a nine-year-old girl. My parents wanted me to learn to love beauty. To theater and beauty I owe so much. Today, however, I want to remember another first time of mine: the first article. Chance would have it, that three years ago, I found myself writing about a wonderful show, staged at the Donizetti Theater, the same one my parents took me to many, many years before. On stage was Neri Marcorè, an amazing actor and performer of the precious DeAndrean repertoire. For two years now, I have had the immense good fortune to follow the Prose and Other Paths season of the Donizetti Theater Foundation for Bergamonews. An experience that has changed me, made me a better woman and citizen. The weekly appointment, the interviews with actors and directors, the lights going out a moment before the show starts…. I miss it all so much. It couldn’t be any other way. Francesca Lai’s article: bit.ly/3fnCNmw
You get a free subscription to Other Paths, your friends who love you. You arrive, sit down the first night, and punctually in front of you the elegant lady with the very, very (very) backcombed hair. Patience, we’ll swing a little to the left and a little to the right, hoping not to irritate those behind us in turn. You already know what your favorite show will be. What you don’t know is thirst. Because that piece of theater and poem quenches your thirst it increases your languor. It is March 28, 2018. You are Mariangela Gualtieri. We are the Social Theater. “Porpora, rito sonoro per cielo e terra”. Gone is the backcombing, that mostly eyes are closed anyway. Gone is the theater, its splendor you grasp before and after, during you let it go. Gone is your body, which becomes a home where you indulge in reception and pleasure and searching. And in thirst. Each word comes off his lips, rises and swirls across the stage and then rests on that tip of your heart that melts and thrills. This is “Porpora.” For those who love Mariangela Gualtieri’s poetry, for those who drink her words. And it is never enough.
If I fell in love with theater, it was also because of “Sogno di una notte di mezza estate,” which the Donizetti hosted I think in 1989. I had been brought to the theater, almost forced. I was 13 years old. I was thunderstruck. And the next day, shy, I went back to the box office to buy a ticket again (this time in the pigeonhole, second gallery, paid with “my” money), to go back and see it again. I understood almost nothing, but it was a wonderful drunkenness. I never stopped looking for that feeling, which tickles the heart, head and body. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by and with Glauco Mauri | Prose Season 1988-1989.
Theater workers’ recollections
Of course, the show that impressed me the most in my 10 years of service to the Donizetti Theater was Slava’s Snowshow…. I remember many moments that left me breathless. Being an usher I had a chance to see it again and again…. I miss “my theater.” For me, the Donizetti theater has always had many meanings including home, sharing and hope. I owe everything to this theater. Since that first day of working as an extra in Piccinni’s opera “La Cecchina,” my life has changed. I began to discover a world unknown to me and there I decided that I would never again part with it…. #apertiairicordi #iorestoacasa Christian Invernizzi – Fondazione Teatro Donizetti personnel manager
I could mention many of the titles that have impressed me the most over the years, such as “Le sorelle Macaluso” or “Bianco su Bianco,” but one of the greatest emotions associated with the theater remains for me the tour through the empty Donizetti that I took in the company of Chiara when I was hired. Perhaps not everyone knows that from the ticket office of the Donizetti Theater there was a passageway that led directly inside the hall. From the second floor of the boxes, one could thus directly access the stage and by a more circuitous route the galleries as well. Just opening that creaky door and being catapulted into such an unusual and majestic dimension, the turning between the red velvet corridors and catching glimpses, with a gasp, of the theater between the open doors of the boxes is a magical memory that will stay with me forever. I experienced it as a privilege to be able to wander around and discover the “secret passages” that led from the galleries to the boxes and then up to find myself face to face with the trellis, to spy behind the curtain and still tread the thick boards of the backstage, careful not to trip over the tangle of ropes and cables. These are some of the aspects I miss most: the intimate moments of theater life. Sara Fustinoni – Ticket Office Fondazione Teatro Donizetti
There is no particular memory-or, at least, no single memory. It has been twelve years now that I have worked for the Donizetti Theater first and for the Fondazione Teatro Donizetti now, and at this sad and dark time, there are many memories: from the first time I set foot in the city theater, still a high school student, to my subsequent university attendance, to the other side, that of those who now work in that theater. And so as a memory I would like to use this photo, not so much for the show, which was beautiful (The Visitor with Alessio Boni and Alessandro Haber in 2016), but for that image of the audience: happy, standing, grateful. It is for them that we produce theater. Michela Gerosa – Communications Office, Fondazione Teatro Donizetti
“At a time when we are isolated in our homes, I would like to recall the prose play, staged at the Social Theater last year, entitled “Si nota all’imbrunire (Solitudine da paese spopolato),” in which the protagonist, played by Silvio Orlando, decides to withdraw from social life while dreaming of the company of his closest relatives. If in the past play the actor chooses to close himself off from the outside world, in the present real situation we are confined indoors by necessity, but in both cases we witness a loss of balance between individuality and collectivity. Now that we find ourselves all the time in the domestic space, as we look outside waiting to see our affections again and to travel the world, we can look inward by dedicating ourselves to ourselves, and value this dimension as well because, as Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “He who does not love solitude does not love freedom.”
I started working in the theater during the 2016/2017 season, the last theater season at the Donizetti before the renovation. That year, the Prose Season was opened by Alessandro Baricco’s “Smith Wesson,” with Natalino Balasso and Fausto Russo Alesi on stage. This show also inaugurated my first stint in the gallery, an area of the theater that I loved from the start and have sorely missed during these years at the Social Theater. The memory of this show is still extremely vivid in my memory. With “HUMAN” by Marco Baliani and Lella Costa, I realized that I was no longer a mere spectator, but a part of the theater itself. The story brought to the stage by the two artists was so engaging that the audience had become one with the actors, in a palpable and emotional silence. I remember thinking that without the audience we could not have theater, and it was with the audience that we were able to love. Slava’s Snowshow, to see which my colleagues and I were competing to get into the auditorium. It was an amazing, exciting and beautiful show that I never hoped to see at the Donizetti. This show allowed me to realize that the theater is a family in which I would have liked to grow up and that in this closed period I miss it very much. The show I carry in my heart, however, is “Quello che non ho,” with Neri Marcorè, the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini and the music of Fabrizio De André. The last show in the Donizetti setting, which I had the opportunity to see on my 21st birthday. A show full of emotions, great artists and an involved audience, which I love to remember in moments of nostalgia, in the hope of being able to return soon to the places we love.
When I think of all the good memories I have accumulated in just over a year as a mask, I really struggle to choose just one. Perhaps among the most intense is the one about the show “La lista,” an almost unknown story told by Laura Curino in an extraordinary monologue. In the dimness of memory (and of the hall), I can still see the soft light that reverberated on the sparse stage and on the enraptured faces of the spectators, evoking that enchanted silence that no one would ever want to end, the intimate atmosphere of an intellectual dialogue about art but above all about the courage of freedom. Freedom that for me was and will also be this: going to the theater and breathing its magic.
Well … there are so many shows I have attended in the past 10 years of working at the Donizetti Theater, but given the particular current situation immediately I think of “Finale di partita” that was staged just a few months ago. I love Beckett and I love the theater of the absurd. Simple, short and meaningless dialogues. Undefined and insubstantial characters. Scenography dark, heavy, pared down but bringing out a swirl of questions and reflections. The loneliness, the anguish, the hollowness of the human being who gives up moving and is overcome by the devastated world around him. The more I try to understand it, the less I understand it. I have watched this play twice: what really fascinates me is the madness of the art
When I think back to the Donizetti Theater, I think of darkness. The theater is one of the few places where it is always dark even during the day, when there is no show in the evening. A darkness that is sometimes reassuring, sometimes vaguely eerie, where every now and then a glimmer of sharp sunshine passes through a stage door left ajar, or where a flickering neon from a stairwell accompanies the echo of my footsteps. One can even feel lost in the theater, or jerk at the slightest creak of the wooden planks in the dull silence (the wood is constantly moving and settling imperceptibly), when the only reference is the blue light of the clock in the auditorium that remains there, always the same, marking a time already passed. It is on those days that you can smell what I call “the smell of theater,” a smell that is only here, that lingers on your clothes, made from a mixture of dust, wood, hemp from the strings, iron and upholstery.
In the course of my work experience with the Donizetti Theater, I have had the opportunity to serve in various roles and capacities, from an opera figurant to a porter to my current role as a member of the theatre staff as an usher. Thus, I have been fortunate to experience “theater life” from multiple perspectives, both from the stage and from behind the scenes, both in contact with the performers and the audience. Of memories I have accumulated many, but the one I feel like sharing is not a specific episode, but rather a feeling, an atmosphere. And it is the one that one breathes just before the opening of the Theater to the public, that moment when the various members of the staff, the fundamental cogs of the great contraption that is the Theater, are caught up in a particular frenzy, each one intent on completing the final preparations that his or her particular role requires, from the stagehand to the usher, from the ticket taker to the photographer, from the members of the administration to the actors, and so on. And despite the great professionalism that each task requires, the real magic is that you still manage to breathe an air of familiarity, of complicity, a special alchemy between all these components that allows everything to be managed (even the unexpected…and at the Theater many of them do happen) in the best possible way and that then, when everything is ready and everyone is in place, allows you to finally throw open the doors of the theater to the spectators and begin (their) evening. This is something subtle, perhaps not directly noticeable by the audience, but I think it contributes to making an evening at the Theater a wonderful experience. Here, this is what I miss most about the Theater and what I hope, as soon as the situation allows, to experience again soon.
This being a special time and the Donizetti Theater an even more special space for me, I have taken time to condense thoughts appropriately. My very first memory of the Donizetti Theater dates back to around the year 2000. I was in the midst of the “Actor’s Course” at Teatro Prova, I was nearing the conclusion of my course at the Liceo Artistico in Bergamo, and in my mind the “sacred fire” that would lead me to Paolo Grassi was just beginning to make its way. I don’t really remember by whom I was pushed, but I found myself at an afternoon (probably a general) performance of an extraordinary “Fedra” played by an incomparable Mariangela Melato. Yet the most incisive memory is not about the actress, but about the set design. Of such visual impact that it took root in my thoughts. With scenic movements of such “monumental gracefulness” as to increase in me a desire to guess the “behind the scenes” bordering on poignancy. The attraction to the “behind the scenes” has never left me since. It followed me into Paolo Grassi when, a student in the Dramatic Writing course, I would sneak in to peek at Professor Palla’s stagecraft workshop. It stayed firmly with me when, in 2007, I landed at the interview for the selection of the new theater ushers for Teatro Donizetti and was hired. I drank with my eyes every millimeter of that wonderful “dream machine” that was being revealed to me through the first cognitive journey of its spaces with Matteo Sartori. My mouth opened from reverential awe at the unveiling of proscenium and backstage from an entirely new point of view. Years have passed since that first discovery, but the fascination with the gears of this splendid wonder machine remains intact and the curiosity, far from being satisfied, grows with each new discovery and, I sincerely hope, never ceases.
