THEATER AT MUSEUM
Theater at museum is a cultural format to enhance the experience of visiting the museum through the use of theater language. The goal is to offer visitors an intimate, engaging, emotional journey, to bridge the gap between the desire to visit a museum and the feeling of not having adequate cultural preparation to have this experience. For each museum identified in agreement with local museum organizations and institutions, the working group chooses professional and technical tools suitable for enhancing the history of the museum space, the treasures of the collection, and the importance of the collection in the life of the visitors.
Idea and realization Guinea Pigs
Project management Marco De Francesca
Playwriting by Giulia Tollis and Luca Rodella
The format provides for a close synergy with the reality that deals with guided tours of the museum: the guide provides information and theoretical, technical and historical details, the theater professionals allow you to create and guide the emotional and sensory experience of the visitors.
Each phase includes a site-specific design in collaboration with organizations, associations and groups of citizens, listening to the needs of the territory and the reference communities. Artists meet the promoters of the initiative (artistic direction of a festival, an exhibition, a cultural event; public or private organizing) and with a working time dedicated to explore the territory, they familiarize with local people, places, social and cultural terrain in which the work is linked. Together with the promoters, the artists identify the actors, times, methods and objectives of the creative process that will lead to the creation of the interactive installation and live performance.
THE STAGES
Confidences
10th of November 2019 | Palazzo Morando in Milano
Readings through Casa Morando halls
reading conceived and produced by Guinea Pigs
within the project AMUSE edited by Associazione MuseoCity within the contribution of Fondazione Cariplo
with Marco De Francesca and Sofia Pauly
playwriting Giulia Tollis
direction Riccardo Mallus
Palazzo Morando, located in the heart of Milan, offers the visitor two paths: the first unravels between paintings and sculptures capable of restoring a fresco of nineteenth-century Milan, the second enters the rooms of the apartment of its last owners, Gian Giacomo Morando Attendolo Bolognini and his wife Lydia Caprara di Montalba.
The two interpreters live in the Morando Attendolo Bolognini apartment, evoking the history of the house and of its owners, from the Villa family, up to the spouses whose name the Palace bears today. A story made of everyday life, fragments of relationships, gestures and words said in intimacy. Between documented historical data and literary inventions, the readings take visitors back in time to evoke the presence of those who once passed through them in the now uninhabited rooms of the Palace.
Covered with only flowers
13th of December 2019 | La Casa delle Artiste – Spazio Alda Merini di Milano
Impossible interview with an untamable woman
Perfomance conceived and produced by Guinea Pigs within the project AMUSE edited by Associazione MuseoCity
with Letizia Bravi and Marco De Francesca
voice and music by Riccardo Tabilio
playwriting Giulia Tollis e Benedetta De Falco
direction Riccardo Mallus
The Casa delle Artiste – Spazio Alda Merini hosted the piece of art “Coperta delle donne” from the 4th to 14th of December 2019, an artistic project by the journalist and writer Alina Rizzi which between 2008 and 2018 saw more than 200 Italian and foreign women involved in the creation of the tiles that compose it. In ten years the blanket has reached three meters by six and has given life to a community of people and stories gathered around the art of sewing.
The performance takes place in dialogue with this work set up in the upper room of the Casa delle Artiste, where the poet’s bedroom is kept. It is structured like an impossible interview by an admirer of Merini who tries to snatch answers about the poet’s private life. Her questions remain unanswered but become the pretext to give body and voice to the many pieces that make up a woman – vocation, sensuality, talent, relationship with money, motherhood… – to tell a life and many lives together.
Memories of a duchess: objects tell stories
06th of June 2021 | Museo Glauco Lombardi in Parma
Theater tale conceived and produced by Guinea Pigs
with Letizia Bravi and Marco De Francesca
playwriting Giulia Tollis
direction Riccardo Mallus
organization Agnese Bizzarri
Maria Luigia of Habsburg, duchess of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla for over thirty years, is the protagonist of the story.
The interpreters give voice to Maria Luigia and some historical figures such as General Neipperg, the artist Paolo Toschi, his daughter Albertina Montenuovo Sanvitale. Through archival materials, historical chronicles, official correspondence, private correspondence and intimate diary pages, the performance wants to tell, with modesty and humility, Maria Luigia to today’s audience. The interpreters accompany the public in the halls of the Museum like two contemporary storytellers. Not a historical re-enactment in costume, but a theatrical game that recounts some moments of the duchess’ public and private life, starting with the objects, accessories, dresses, paintings, memorabilia, which have been part of her intimacy and her affections.
A mid-autumn night’s party
26th of September 2021 | Chinese and Ethnographic Museum of Parma
Reading conceived and produced by Guinea Pigs
with Marco De Francesca
sound design Gianluca Agostini
playwriting Giulia Tollis
direction Riccardo Mallus
organization Agnese Bizzarri
Rituals of passage from summer to autumn, to celebrate the time of the equinox and tell it through images, words and music. A dialogue between the ancient myths of different cultures and the contemporary festivals that still honor this transition.A mid-autumn party to meet and get together around a season, its symbols, a cycle that ends so that another cycle, inside and outside of us, can begin.
Associazione Culturale Laboratorio d’Arte Performativa Guinea Pigs
P. Iva | C. F 11504490969
Via Bernardo Davanzati 28
20158 Milano – Italia
guineapigsteatro@gmail.com