Paradiso. Un pezzo sacro

Daniele Rizzo

From the imagoturgical suggestions to the itinerant mode, from the plastic dressing of the sets to the amazing attoral restitutions, from the poverty of the costumes to the chaotic quiet of the sound system, this Paradise. A sacred piece is, in fact, a true summation of much of Lenzi's virtues, an afterworld in which, waiting for us without welcoming us, you will find a dizzying gallery of characters [...] In Heaven. A sacred piece, the mixture of sentimental and intellectual factors and imaginative and cognitive abilities is, from this point of view, exemplary of an attitude that educates the human being to the extent that it provokes him to adapt to the environment (scenic/real) without passively accepting it, but recreating it by seeking in it.

Giuseppe Distefano

With their subversion of unusual places and surfaces for site-specific installations, Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto of Lenz Fondazione once again open visions on new perspectives of spatial crossings, on other territories of a city, Parma, a container of architectural and monumental revelations normally not usable. With Purgatory the doors of the former Old Hospital which later became a library had opened to us; with the next Inferno they will lower us into the warm belly of the waste-to-energy plant; today, however, with Paradise they have led us inside the transparent and futuristic North Bridge which stands out suspended in the middle of the dry river of the Emilian town.

Gabriele Balestrazzi

When you go down to the ground floor, you would like to add a big collective hug to the applause. For the emotions, for the realization and also for the extraordinary idea of bringing Verdi and Dante right there, into the kingdom of emptiness or useless dinners up to now. And you would like to say to everyone that it was not just a beautiful evening of theater (and music and poetry), moreover embellished by the sensitive laboratory that Lenz has been carrying out for years with very high results with intellectual disability. But it was also a wonderful lesson to the city: how Culture, the one that the next day makes you want to take up Dante's verses again and delve deeper into Verdi, can concretely transform even a meaningless Bridge into a Paradise.

Tania Bedogni

And it is with the singing that Lenz chooses to have Verdi dialogue with Dante outside the velvets and golden woods of the historic and central Teatro Regio, to lead him under the metal balconies and glass walls of this contemporary and peripheral space suspended over the water. The voice is connective in perfect balance with the movements of the bodies (of the artists and the audience), the weighing of the lights, the selection of the recitation, the placement of the sound, as well as the choice of materials and costumes. Lenz gives the city back a sensitive experience of fertile Grace, translating with performative language what words alone cannot achieve, as Dante already recognized in the writing of the last Cantica: “Trasumar significar per verba non si pota” .

Simone Azzoni

The space is architecture of Maierian memory, in the sense that the North Bridge acoustically isolates the surrounding soundscape but makes it permeable to the eye. The inside dialogues with the outside, suspending the spectators who have flocked to "Paradiso Un Pezzo Sacro", inside an separated and autonomous space-time bubble. Then in the end we hear Dante who “India” (becomes God) canceling himself out in space and time and then we understand that Paradise on earth, between ring roads and ghostly factories, is more human than a utopia.

Matteo Brighenti

Man is the voice of the tale. Dante is our eyes, our ears, our steps. We see, we feel, we cross the Paradise of the woman of Lenz Foundation because he sees it, he feels it, he passes through it for us. With us. The “absolute pilgrim” chases, desires, wants Beatrice, like Orlando wants Angelica

This continuous search is love. Love that builds, already in its throbbing, the reality it dreams of living: the journey makes the journey. And vision makes space, in the immense void of the North Bridge of Parma. It is no coincidence that Lenz faced Orlando Furioso and now travels through the Divina Commedia: it is an artistic, tiring and conscious practice, which is nourished by that ‘creative’ love and is reflected in that search for the human and unstoppable ‘universal’.

Alessandro Rigolli

An atmosphere full of voices, lights, gestures, water and elaborate sounds –musical dramaturgy edited by Andrea Azzali – which explored the female universe with engaging expressiveness in a sort of profoundly human catharsis.

Christian Donelli

A unique and rare beauty show.

Tommaso Chimenti

The poetics of Lenz has this ability and strength, to undermine places and bend them to the very meaning of dramaturgy, through a great architectural study to which theatrical choices, words, visions, worlds, projections, abstractionisms can be combined. Collage is always a wave that leaves many doors wide open on a reflection perpetually in progress, a sum of images full of fascination and suggestions, a density of aestheticizing overlaps, refined, detailed, clean, set in a decisive rigor and in a formal coherence lucid and transparent.

Franco Acquaviva

Here the feeling of being in a large belly dripping maternal moods is very strong, an ascension that is also descent into the female body. We move further to the last painting, where the evolutions of the choir continue circular and reiterated around Paolo Maccini's “sensitive” Dante and where all the singers are hooded in waterproof sheets that geometriz the bodies in rigid angles and Dante remains only finally with the last words And the light is now Me. Paradise of women and singing, of moods and flesh, of contrasts and light, of sweetness and fragility.

Francesca Ferrari

The rustles of the costumes that leave the room, the memory of the light in Dante's words, as well as in the incisive, rounded, imagoturgical projection on the backdrop, and a very powerful and mysterious final sound texture, close between distant, vaguely science fiction echoes and suggestions, an astonishing, contemporary, experiential journey.

Margherita Portelli

Lenz manages, once again, to investigate and surprise, without pretending to give answers and without blushing in the presence of two “sacred monsters” like Verdi and Dante, who in the encounter rediscover themselves as incredibly contemporary.