Double appointment with “Camille, journey into the soul” by the award-winning theater director Luisa Corcione this week in Benevento, in Sala SoloT, on 3 May at 8.30pm and the next in Naples, Sala Assoli, on 6 May at 8pm. In Camille Luisa Corcione works on the texts of Enrico Manzo (Fringe Award for Dramaturgy) mixing the poetry of Paul Claudel with letters between her sister Camille and her lover August Rodin and diaries rendered image, in the sound carpet of the synthesized melodies of Marco Vidino and the songs of the chansonnier Peppe Voltarelli. The voice overs of Lino Musella And Giacinto Palmarini and again, the paintings on paper by Rosaria Corcioneportraits of Camille that are torn at each performance, accompany the performative story of the fragmentation of the protagonist’s soul: on stage it is Noemi Francesca intense actress (winner of the Leo de Berardinis and the 2024 New Sensibilities Award). Assistant director Francesca Romana was born. This project has won numerous awards; Roma Fringe as Best Show, Fersen Research and Innovation Award, Marcello Primiceri Award for Best Show and Summer Fiorentina 2022 and is co-financed by the European Union with the support of Superfly Soul Bar Of Gianni Fiorillowhich has always been a place of meeting and exchange between artists and intellectuals of the historic center of Naples.
Camille, journey into the soul it is a multidisciplinary project, therefore also an exhibition of art, paintings and artefacts with which Luisa, Rosaria and Anna Corcione they intend to restore the internalization of the sculptor’s life and work Camille Claudel. The dialogue between the interventions of each author – with the works Second Skin by Anna, the show Approx./1000 by Luisa e Camille/Sew up of Rosaria – reconstructs Claudel’s complex human and artistic journey in fragments: her emblematic experience becomes a story about marginalization and the stigma of madness in the struggle for emancipation in a context still dominated by men. The works of Rosaria and Luisa Corcione enter the scenic space of the show allowing the spectator to walk through it, the “stage” is at the same time an exhibition space and an atelier of Camille Claudel where the interpreter Noemi Francesca interacts both with the works and with the users of the performance.
With Camille/Sew up Rosaria Corcione recovers the paintings originally created for the show, recomposing tears to better understand the physiognomy and faces that repaint Camille as a child, artist, lover, mature woman. The torn and crumpled paper is stretched out on a canvas that recalls medical gauze in an attempt to mend that soul with an almost maternal care.
Second Skin Of Anna Corcione cancels the figuration. The series is designed to describe the feeling of inappropriateness of those who yearn for social acceptance while hiding their true nature. The natural fiber paper, the material of the works, is washed, wrung out, modeled and then made up, to create imperfections that resemble the skin and then hide them with make up. The works acquire materiality with the addition of makeup which makes the skins similar to sculpted bronze plates, in a combination of lightness and structure.
“The idea of bringing on stage these paintings which represent “the inmates”, the women with whom Claudel lived for thirty years in the Montfavet mental hospital – anticipates Luisa Corcione – and the patients who were dying of starvation in the psychiatric hospitals of France, was born from a practical need. When I decided to tell this story I didn’t have a production and money to hire several actors. I had canvases and old paints and a vision of what those women might have been like. Rosaria created a first painting depicting Claudel and entrusted it to the scene, to the actress who interacts with it with a tear. Every time we bring this work on stage, we create a new work. I believe that today more than ever it is necessary to talk about Claudel and his life not lived, of that historical moment in which being a woman kept you out of the world of art, even today a male prerogative. And to remember, decades later, from law 180 and Basaglia that “a psychiatric patient is a person who needs to be treated and not hidden in a prison for the insane”. Therefore, Camille’s courage is on display, the strength that gave her made profound and authentic but also worn out and the works on stage are his diary, the desperate cry of a soul that passes from the happiness of a tormented love relationship, to resentment and reverie. This project is a caress for those who have loved without end, for those who created so much without having anything in return, for those who carried the burden of so many women born in the wrong time”.
