Party in Spoleto to remember the artistic director of the Festival dei Due Mondi. Among memories, videos, and testimonies of great artists
Spoleto. “Which show do you prefer?”. Banal answer, everyone. Maybe “Peter Pan”, or Beckett’s The good days, Here you are. And instead, to remember Giorgio Ferraraartistic director of the Festival of Two Worlds of Spoleto from 2008 to 2020, in the meeting-show held on Saturday at the Teatro Nuovo Gian Carlo Menotti, the great director Bob Wilson sent a poem recited in images and alliteration: “A hymn for him”, three minutes of dizzying syntactic leaps and phonetics that encompassed the long, powerful thirteen years of direction of the most prestigious and eclectic music, dance and theater festival of the great director as an anecdote could never have told.
The objective of the project “Love Letters to Giorgio. The many worlds of Giorgio Ferrara”, curated by Fabiana Giacomotti at the request of the artistic director of the Festival dei Due Mondi, Monique Veaute, was precisely this: a mobile and ephemeral museum of memory and affection, a temporary place which, through the disciplines of theatre, music, ballet, and art professions, would allow us to reconstruct, with a rigorous but also affectionate approach, the thirteen years in which Ferrara revived the fortunes of the Festival dei Due Mondi, returning it to world art interest and delivering it to today’s popular success. Images, ideas, memories, notes, videos, memorabilia.
Notes of shows built with passion, but also imbued with the sense of community and sharing that are the prerequisites for leaving a mark on the memory and the heart. This journey through suggestions and images, which welcomed Adriana Asti, legendary actress and Ferrara’s life partner, with a standing ovation, and which is accompanied by a small exhibition in via Saffi curated by Piero Maccarinelli, was attended by Andrée Ruth Shammah, the director Emma Dante, the composers Silvia Colasanti and Alessio Vlad, the Oscar-winning set designer Gianni Quaranta, the president of the Carla Fendi Foundation, Maria Teresa Venturini Fendi, the costume designers and designers Vincent Darré and Maurizio Galante, the writer René de Ceccatty, as well as the president of Anica Francesco Rutelli who recalled the reasons for choosing Ferrara during the years of his management of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, and which are then the same ones told by his collaborators to the public: the ability to listen and to unite. Above all, as Shammah pointed out, to feel genuine enthusiasm for the success of others. Which in years of social protagonism, sounds like Ferrara’s first and most important lesson, while waiting for a real critical study of his complete works.
