Free only when she pierces herself and her desire, killing the love, spiritual and carnal, that has always obsessed her. And so, among nuns possessed by the devil in a monastery where an inquisitor tries to exorcise them, Renata will take the form of a Madonna while the angel Madiel will fall at her feet. They are both victims of the prejudices of a society that sees evil where there is only the desire to love of a free woman and therefore condemned to the stake as if she were a witch. Directed by Emma Dante, the premiere of Sergej Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel was staged last night at the Petruzzelli theater in Bari.
On the stage of the Politeama Bari, in five acts, the majesty and powerful elegance of the Russian composer’s notes played by Petruzzelli’s orchestra. Leading it for two and a half hours was maestro Jordi Bernàcer who also directed the theater choir, always up to the most difficult tests.
The macabre costumes, grayed and worn by time, designed by Vanessa Sannino are fascinating. Carmine Maringola’s sets, Christian Zucaro’s lighting design and Manuela Lo Sicco’s choreography make it difficult to look away to read the Italian translation in the surtitles.
The most applauded among the cast is Renata, played by Ángeles Blanca Gulín. The protagonist of the journey that confuses good with evil throughout the work is the angel Madiel played by a breakdance dancer who, explains Emma Dante, “flies using his lower limbs: his legs become wings” to “hover from the ground in a reverse dynamism in which the ground will become its sky”.
Historically we are in Germany in the 16th century, among catacombs, skeletons and ancestral figures. But in The Fiery Angel, the director highlights, “we are in a mental state, in a sometimes spiritual location without place or time”. A time that Renata spends struggling with her feelings, victim of her desire to love which leads her to always choose the wrong man in whom she hopes to find her beloved Madiel: first with Count Heinrich and then with Ruprecht . A torment that finds its culmination when she herself asks the angel for forgiveness for having sought him, the divine, in someone who is only a man.
“Renata is destined for a mystical martyrdom. As in an exorcism – says Dante – she frees herself from the devil-angel and sacrifices herself, becoming an icon, in front of a skeletal Christ, with a bony body and a woman’s face”.
Reproduction reserved © Copyright ANSA
