LAC (Lugano art and culture)

LAC season 2023/24: we start with an autumn full of twists and turns

14 September 2023

Curated by Editorial Team

The LAC's 2023/24 artistic season, entitled The Book of Dreams, unfolds its journey through opera, theatre, dance, music and musicals, festivals, residencies and collaborations, offering a calendar of shows capable of satisfying the most demanding audiences

Once the summer period has passed, the 2023/24 season LAC opens on September 4th in the name of production with the debut of the opera Anna Bolena by Gaetano Donizetti, conducted by Diego Fasolis with I Barocchisti and the Swiss Radio and Television Choir and directed by Carmelo Rifici, followed by three performances and an Italian tour. With this highly anticipated show, the LAC returns to producing an opera and does so by choosing Anna Bolena, a lyrical tragedy that represents one of the highest peaks of Donizetti's operatic production and of romantic opera in general. Inspired by drama Henry VIII by Marie-Joseph Blaise de Chénier, debuted in Milan in 1830, achieving extraordinary success. Donizetti composed it on the spot, in just thirty days, for the soprano who was its protagonist, Giuditta Pasta, and the tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini, both true legends of early nineteenth-century opera. Despite the initial success, the opera gradually left the repertoire until, in 1957 at the Teatro alla Scala, Maria Callas gave it a real second life thanks to a memorable interpretation, in the staging directed by Gianandrea Gavazzeni and directed by Luchino Visconti.

An appointment of the season absolutely not to be missed is December 13th and 14th, when the director Robert Wilson - among the most important visual and theatrical artists in the world - returns to collaborate with the American choreographer Lucinda Childs for Relative Calm, a multimedia show on the music of Jon Gibson, John Adams and the famous Pulcinella Suite by Igor Stravinsky.

For the 40th anniversary of the Finzi Pasca Company, which presents three shows loved by the public in season – Luna Park from 15 to 17 September, Icaro on 16 and 17 December and White on White on 23 and 24 February, which tell different moments of a forty-year journey - the LAC has chosen to pay homage to the resident company with a photographic installation in the hall of the cultural center, and with in-depth evenings with the founders. An opportunity to meet with an excellence in the artistic panorama who, starting from Lugano, has brought his vision and poetics throughout the world.

During the season, some thematic focuses will be presented capable of bringing together shows and projects with different natures and visions, to offer the broadest and deepest possible artistic gaze on reality and the world. Through the shows, common threads are composed and unfolded, dotted with cultural mediation activities.

Thus, for example, the focus "The Book of Dreams" evokes the voice of the unconscious, materializing it in visions that the artists rework: a pool of images and forms of another reality which, although impalpable, comes to life and supplants the real one.

The focus alludes to the creative force of the dream world, the place of genesis of unexpected forms of communication and new languages that contrast with the compliant and crystallized codes of contemporary social media. The Focus shows sometimes touch on the theme, evoking typical mechanisms of dream narration, to surprisingly overturn reality, as in the comedy The flea in the ear by Georges Feydeau directed by Carmelo Rifici; other times they enter completely into it as in the alienated atmospheres of The City by Martin Crimp brought to the stage by director Jacopo Gassmann and into the psychological abyss of En Abyme by director Fabiana Iacozzilli.

If the dream is a deformed mirror in which to find otherwise inaccessible languages, reality, in its historical narrative, asserts itself as a necessity for taking up the events of the past and making them indelible in order to imagine the future. History therefore returns to the scene with the focus "In the eye of history", in an era in which news and facts follow one another at a frenetic pace, favoring alienation. This is where the project was born Eightynine by Compagnia Frosini/Timpano, on stage at the Teatro Foce on 22 November, which relates history to contemporaneity, comparing the current crisis with the French Revolution and 1989. The show is more intimate De Gasperi: Europe is burning by Carmelo Rifici who, starting from an individual story, traces his relationship with Italian history and with the other protagonists of the time.