In the year of the seventh centenary of Marco Polo’s death, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, in collaboration with the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome, is proud to present the musical performance Invisible Cities, freely adapted from Italo Calvino.
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even though the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. … You don’t appreciate the seven or seventy-seven wonders of a city, but the answer it gives to your question. Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer it”
In our world, the imperative of production, codification and hyper-information seems to want to erase any secret and uniqueness of places and every community of people living together. But even in a metropolis it is possible to find a “hidden city”, “perfect” in its own way,
“made of fragments mixed with the rest, instants separated by intervals, signals one sends out without knowing who will receive them.” “… moving along compact walls … when you least expect it, you see a crack open and a different city appear, which has already vanished an instant later …”
E così avviene spesso a Venezia, città nascosta dagli stereotipi e che Marco non nomina mai, per timore che vada dissipata in immagini e nomi abusati. Ma basta cambiare il punto di osservazione, ed ecco che la città appare come non si era mai vista prima.
And so it is in Venice, a city hidden by stereotypes, which Marco never mentions for fear of it dissolving into hackneyed images and names. But we only have to change our point of view and the city appears as it has never been seen before.
This is also the case with the musical suite we propose: a compositional canvas in five movements, constructed through the musical experimentation with the musicians/students and with the help of diagrams. Imaginary cities, wonderful or distressing, leave in music an imprint that reveals them with unexpected illuminations. Each performance becomes unique and unrepeatable, just like the cities that Calvino invites us to discover.
1) Desire, memory, thin cities. 2) Encoding, reticles, maps, production. 3) Hell. 4) Kan’s empyre is “nothingness: a dowel of planed wood”. 5) “A bridge, stone by stone”. Venice.
Voices: Arianna Moro, Silvia Cattarinich. Violin: Ottavia Carlon. Trumpet: Daniele Goldoni. Alto saxophone: Federica Lizio. Accordion: Marco Gerolin. Guitar: Pietro Maria Cintura. Electric guitar: Francesco Rossi. Keyboard: Eugenio Cereser. Keyboard: Silvia Tesser. Cello: Chiara Trabujo. Double bass: Daniele Roccato. Double bass: Gabriele Pagliano. Text: Daniele Goldoni.
Admission is free, subject to availability.