After ‘Otello Circus’, successfully presented in 2023, the ‘Teatro La Ribalta’ company returns to Bergamo with ‘The Queen’s Mirror’, a show included in the Other Paths Season of the Donizetti Theater Foundation and scheduled for Thursday, February 20 at the Teatro Sociale (8:30 PM). Written and directed by Antonio Viganò, ‘The Queen’s Mirror’ originally revisits the Snow White fairy tale, offering a reflection on the beauty contained in each person’s diversity. On stage are three actors: Jason Mattia De Majo, Maria Magdolna Johannes, and Rocco Ventura, who were also the protagonists of ‘Otello Circus’. Choreography by Eleonora Chiocchini. Dramaturgy assistant and sound design by Paola Guerra. Creation collaboration by Paola Guerra and Paolo Grossi. Set design by Roberto Banci and Antonio Viganò. Light design by Melissa Pircali. Produced by Teatro La Ribalta in co-production with Tanz Bozen Bolzano Danza Festival, with the support of L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora, Centro di Residenza Emilia-Romagna and the Cultural Institutes of the Republic of San Marino. Duration 50 minutes without intermission.
In ‘The Queen’s Mirror’, the famous Snow White fairy tale features two unlikely characters as protagonists: a Queen tired of always having to be ‘the fairest in the land’ and her Mirror which, weary of always having to repeat ‘what others do’, will seek an escape route.
The Queen, orphaned of her reflected image, must therefore find a way to regain the trust of the Mirror. The result is an exciting tale that disassembles and reassembles one of the most famous fairy tales of all time. Eleonora Chiocchini’s choreography reinterprets Antonio Viganò’s theatrical text ‘Bianca Neve’, which has already been staged and translated into various languages: the Mirror and the Queen come to life in a dance of relationships, playful nuances, sometimes quarrelsome, at times mysterious, coloring their dialogue that will become body. Always complicit as only a mirror and the image it reflects can be.
Antonio Viganò wrote in the director’s notes at the time of the debut of ‘The Queen’s Mirror’: ‘Teatro la Ribalta-Kunst der Vielfalt celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2023. We celebrate this birthday by looking back, to understand what we have done and what traces and signs of this adventure have remained. This looking back helps us to see ahead, to understand and then design a near future. The Bolzano Danza Festival, co-producer of the show, has played an important role in our brief but intense history: the first show, ‘The Minotaur’, was born with the complicity of the Festival, as was the show ‘The Sound of Falling’, a performance created by choreographer Julie Anne Stanzak, a historic dancer of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. So this return to the Bolzano Danza Festival has a special flavor. The show is also intended for children and adolescents because we want to meet the new generations, our future. An audience, that of children, who know well the language of the body and will encounter, thanks to this show, interpreters, dancers, and actors who are di-verse, who will reveal to them that being defined as ‘different’ is not something less, a lack, but another possibility, another way, full of poetry, truth, and ability.’
