The sunken cathedral – Workshop on textural voice composition
Inspired by Philip K. Dick’s Galactic Pot-Healer
In the days the workshop is held, certain phrases from Philip K. Dick’s Galactic Pot-Healer will become the musical notes of a system fixing the chromatic scale of speech a priori while leaving to the ability of each actor the task of recomposing that scale into a compositional unit. This will be the goal throughout the workshop until, on the last day, everyone is called on to raise a sound body within a time span of some twenty-five minutes. No one can tell what is going to happen. The performance involving everyone will attempt, in an ever changing compositional manner, to raise the sunken cathedral three times in a row. After all, does the Glimmung, the mysterious alien creature in Dick’s tale, not recruit specific experts from all over the galaxy to raise the legendary cathedral of Heldscalla that has sunk beneath the Mare Nostrum?
The sense of the Workshop lies in declining the plot of the novel in an action: raising. The visible predicate synthesises the tale and comes onto the stage.
Chiara Guidi
The founder – together with Romeo and Claudia Castellucci, and with Paolo Guidi – of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, now the Societas, Chiara Guidi develops her personal research into voice as a dramaturgical key to unlock the sound and meaning of a text, collaborating with such musicians as Scott Gibbons, Michele Rabbia, Daniele Roccato, Francesco Guerri and Giuseppe Ielasi. This research develops its own technique both in productions for an adult audience and in a specific concept of theatrical art for children, which can boast of such historic shows as Buchettino after Charles Perrault. Her most recent works include: Edipo re di Sofocle. Esercizio di memoria per 4 voci femminili and Il regno profondo. Perché sei qui?, a dramatic reading in which she is on stage with the author of the text Claudia Castellucci; in addition to La terra dei lombrichi. Una tragedia per bambini (after Euripides’ Alcestis), Fiabe giapponesi and Edipo. Una fiaba di magia (the latter directed with Vito Matera). She devised the Màntica and Puerilia observatories at the Teatro Comandini in Cesena, and she has also written such recent books as: La voce in una foresta di immagini invisibili (Nottetempo, 2017), with Lucia Amara, Teatro infantile. L’arte scenica davanti agli occhi di un bambino (sossella editore, 2019), “Interrogare e leggere” (Sete, 2021), Fiabe giapponesi (Edizioni Primavera, 2021); among other awards, she has received a Premio Ubu Speciale in 2013, the Premio Lo straniero in 2016 and the Eolo Award 2020 Riconoscenza.