2022
BIENNALE MUSICA 2022-OUT OF STAGE-Arsenale – Teatro alle Tese (III)-GIORGIO BATTISTELLI
Arsenale – Teatro alle Tese (III)
EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC THEATRE
GIORGIO BATTISTELLI
EXPERIMENTUM MUNDI, 1981 (60’)
opera di musica immaginistica for one actor,
four women voices,
sixteen craftsmen and solo percussion
Libretto by Giorgio Battistelli
after the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire
raisonné des sciences, des arts et des
métiers by Denis Diderot
and Jean Le Rond D’Alembert
Peppe Servillo, actor
Nicola Raffone, percussion
Paola Calcagni, Flora Molle, Rosa Pulcini,
Anna Rita Severini, female chorus
Alfredo Sannibale,
Fabio Sannibale, coopers
Roberto Festuccia,
Alberto Casini, carpenters
Marcello Di Palma, baker
Oberdan Carpineti, Pietro Melelli, pavers
Ciro Paudice, Marco Carbone, bricklayers
Gianni Sannibale,
Marco Sannibale, blacksmiths
Aldo Sardilli, Luigi Battistelli, knife sharpeners
Enzo Iezzi, Luigi Diotallevi, cobblers
Francesco Campanella, stone-mason
Angelo Linzalata, light design
Giorgio Battistelli, conductor
La Biennale di Venezia – CIMM, Centro
di Informatica Musicale Multimediale
Thierry Coduys, sound engineer
Experimentum Mundi is a music theatre work for sixteen artisans, four natural female voices, a percussionist and an actor. As the captions to the illustrations of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Enlightenment Encyclopédie describing the tools and the trades represented on the stage are recited, a veritable village of sounds arises page after page. The work is about Giorgio Battistelli’s home town, Albano Laziale, and about those who live and work there who, in Experimentum Mundi perform their own professions, occupations that are today on the brink of disappearing: the baker, the cobbler, the knife sharpeners, the carpenters, the coopers, the blacksmiths, the pavers, the stone-mason, the bricklayers, some accompanied by their wives, who make up the women’s choir. At the end of the performance, each artisan makes his own artefact on stage, in perfect synchrony with the musical and theatrical timings of the score, in a game of interlocking timbres and rhythms that extol the gestures moulded by an ancient tradition. It is a dramaturgy of work, a rite propitiating the halting of time, homage to a personal theatre of the memory.