LA SPOSA BLU

Since I am no longer yours, my freedom fearlessly blows between the wrinkles of these walls and opens infinite rooms, beyond the door behind which you hid the casket of your fears. (Silvia Battaglio)

Through on-stage interaction with three peculiar marionettes dating from the 1940s – part of the Toselli collection held at the Istituto per i Beni Marionettistici e il Teatro Popolare (Institute for Puppetry and Folk Theatre) – this new work aims to retrace the archetypes and meanings embedded within the tale of Bluebeard, using a composite, genre-defying language to suggest a contemporary reading. Prior to writing the stage play, I went through a multi-layered research work, modelling the play’s imagery after passages of the tale and trying to adapt my language to the bodies of the marionettes, to match their expressiveness and gracefulness. Music was instrumental in giving the play its tone, in shaping actions, in underscoring their meaning. I experimented with a new level of composition, with a novel way of weaving together a plot, in which the scenic relationship between me and the marionettes almost appears oriented towards a “correspondence of loving senses”. Here, voice is but the voice of thought, that requires no spoken word and is permeated by the essence of gestures, of eyes meeting, of touch. Touch that turns into sound, music, dance – echo of a story told as if it were a whisper in the ear of the witness to a “contemporary tale”, where traces of the present are visible through lights and shadows. ‘You may open only the doors to the rooms of my choosing’, are the words that Bluebeard repeats throughout, defining an affective relationship grounded in possession, fear and control. Rejecting this coercion, the Blue bride decides to open the secret door, discovering behind it the hidden bodies of the previous marionette-brides who “come back to life” and slip into a “tale” suspended between fantasy and reality, where transgression takes the form of redemption. In her delicate journey of emancipation and transformation, the Blue bride seeks after the light that exists within the darkest, most arcane places. A symbol of the unwillingness to be subjugated and manipulated through violence, she crosses the vast abyss of abusive power – symbolized by Bluebeard – and emerges again, to tell us of love and liberation, to unveil the unknown hidden behind appearances, to lead us in the discovery of ourselves, beyond gender stereotypes.