Alice nel paese delle meraviglie

Choreography, direction and set design Francesco Nappa
Freely inspired by Lewis Carroll’s homonymous work

Music
David Byrne, Robert Moran, John Lurie, Michael Torke, performed by Balanescu Quartet
Video ideation Gilles Papain
Costume design Santi Rinciari
Lighting design Carlo Cerri

Who is Alice? Is she simply Alice Liddell, a melancholy English girl that Charles Dogsdon, alias Lewis Carroll, portrayed in mysterious, and perhaps allusive photographs and lulled with his nonsense words on the banks of the Thames in the Victorian summers made of songs and rhymes, wordplays, charades and imaginary creatures?
Or is she the poetic embodiment of a moment in life in which body and soul are about to transform and take on their own identity which will later determine the future role of existence?
Strongly linked to words, yet inspiring due to its richly imaginative strength, Alice’s metaphorical journey has challenged playwrights and choreographers.
As in the case of Francesco Nappa, a dancer with an impressive curriculum, who has happily dedicated himself to choreography in recent years. He decided to tackle Alice’s labyrinth for his first full-evening ballet with Aterballetto.
The idea of a new staging, in the form of a ballet, of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland came not only from the choreographer’s proposal, who has long been fascinated by this story, but was also triggered by the originality of the work’s approach: though it belongs to the realm of fantasy, it reveals a  constant narrative modernity, in a dialectic between sense and non-sense, a twofold way of relating our experience in the life that surrounds us – both on a level of reality and on a psychological and dream level. These are constant components in the construction of an identity, especially during adolescence.
Based on this interpretative assumption, Nappa’s choreographic work is enriched by video projections ideated by the internationally renowned video-designer Gilles Papain. The choice to add videos reflects the choreographer’s interest in multimedia and aims to obtain a fantasy-dreamlike atmosphere while avoiding invasive scenic equipment.
In the dramaturgic flow, Nappa detects and emphasizes, in an underlying however perceptible way, the continuous self-identification of the writer Carroll with some of his characters in search of a variety of relations: the Caterpillar comforts Alice in an almost paternal way; the White Character leads her where he wants with manipulative psychological capacity; the Hatter expresses a feeling of pure love highlighted in the final pas de deux which conveys, upon Alice’s awakening at the end, an indefinable yet strong feeling of magic memory.

Produced by
FONDAZIONE NAZIONALE DELLA DANZA
in collaboration with
FONDAZIONE I TEATRI

Costumes made by Sartoria Aterballetto
Giuseppina Carbosiero, Nuvia Valestri

World premiere
Reggio Emilia, Teatro Ariosto, 6 November 2011

Lenght: 70’
Ballet for 12 or 14 dancers