by Giacomo Garaffoni
direction Federica Rosellini

*Winning text of the 2021 authors award of the Venice Biennale.

A group of young women becomes a community the day after the death of one of them. Veronica. The scene will never see it. Veronica is a tragedy. Veronica begins the day after a tragedy. Veronica is a marriage. Veronica is an attempt to cross a theater, that of today, which is new and at the same time in ruins.

A reflection on mourning and a purer form of love, but also an anthropological journey from the most primitive form of representation of the body, Venus, up to the contemporary break with all naturalism. This is a path in which the hands of those who get dirty from the lack end up breaking the shape of the memory until it looks like a wound, like the ashes after the fire.

Synopsis

A group of young women becomes a community and leaves the world of the present, the day after the death of one of them. Veronica.

Veronica was one of the “They could”, friends so close that they considered themselves brides. Eleven women who with simple absurdity decide, despite the loss suffered, not to become ten. To remain eleven, to remain wives, to remain mothers, even of ghosts.

Both reading and concert, both theater and performance, with this Mise en lecture directed by Federica Rosellini (Ubu Award for best actress under 35 and associated artist of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan) Veronica opens his dramaturgy to the public in full, up to the last caption and up to the last breath.

In this isolated scenario that produces every sound we hear, claiming the independence of the stage and its absolute present, the spectator contemplates a soundscape devoid of rest, capable of both dominating the scene and abandoning it to a deafening silence. Five performers welcome the text, play it, let it change into song and Veronica’s performative nature emerges dark and powerful in this ruthless race towards a mourning that cannot be remembered.

Veronica
Mise en lecture

by: Giacomo Garaffoni

direction: Federica Rosellini

Performers: Serena Di Biase, Nico Guerzoni, Elena Rivoltini, Federica Rosellini and Martina Ruggeri

Sound direction: Nicola Ratti

Assistant director: Elvira Berarducci

Production: The Venice Biennale

In collaboration with: Piccolo Teatro di Milano

Premiere: 27 and 28 June 2022 – Venice Biennale, Sala d’armi dell’Arsenale