projects

Le tentazioni di Girolamo
Un incubo ridicolo annidato in biblioteca
Music Theatre for speaking voice, female voice, double bass, harp, tape and live electronics (1995)
Text by Ermanno Cavazzoni in an adaptation by Stefania De Santis
Production: Progetto Dionysos/Musica 2000
First performance: 5 - 11 - 95, Air Terminal Ostiense, Roma

Massimo Verdastro (speaking voice), Barbara Lazotti (soprano), Joëlle Leandre (double bass), Lucia Bova (harp), Luca Spagnoletti (recorded sounds), Maurizio Giri (live electronics), Paola De Rossi, Michele Di Stefano, Alessandra Sini, Antonella Sini, Augusto Terenzi (dancers), Loïc Hamelin (light design), Alessandra Sini (choreography), Adrien Tranquilli (stage installation), Stefania De Santis (direction)

Publisher: Edipan
Duration: 50 mins.

Giraolamo, afflicted by insomnia and toothaches wanders around a library the night before an impossible exam, looking for a logical order for the books, which are by now falling apart and degraded. Animal and plant organisms live in the aisles of the library and influence the thoughts of the researchers, provoking break downs in the computer system, and causing a serious of events affecting their linguistic abilities and their memories. The library becomes like a sound box, a boat filled with crazy people led by Girolamo, the victim of crazy librarians and secretaries who impose their strange ways and torment their visitors. In the sarcastic and delirious text of Cavazzoni, the library and its filing system, the search for an alphabetical order and the dictionary, all become mythical elements, obsessions of western culture; ectoplasmic ghosts which undermine the illusion of the knowledge.
Girolamo, the narrative voice and misunderstood victim of objective data, is trapped in dialogue with a multitude of animal and vegetable characters which make his night time research an acoustical nightmare: a progressive and explosive accumulation of sonorous material, generated from his own voice and its involuntary evocations.