Organization

Stage director

Cecilia Ligorio

Conductor

Tito Ceccherini

Costume designer

Domenico Franchi

Set designer

Singer

Maria Eleonora Caminada

Roles

Alda Caiello

Leonardo Cortellazzi

Michele Gianquinto

I Teatri di Reggio Emilia

Others

Ensemble Risognanze

Else

Reggio Emilia

Italy

Teatro Ariosto

Else Gardella

Public

Approved

ELSE | Opera in un atto da Fraulein Else by Arthur Schnitzle

Else points to the abuse of power over intimacy as a disease of our time.
Else, a nineteen year old Viennese from a good family from the early 1900s, is on vacation. A letter from her mother puts her in a rough situation: being her father in serious debt trouble, Else is pressured to ask for money from a rich family friend, old Dorsday, who is staying in the same hotel. The latter, in exchange for her favor, asks the girl to show herself naked. Shocked by the alternative between prostitution or abandoning her father to her fate, Else shows herself naked but she, disgusted at the idea of ​​being alone with the old man, she does it in public. She is delirious, faints and overwhelmed by her anguish, once alone in her room, she gives herself to death.

Schnitzler forces us on a journey into the folds of the young Else's stream of consciousness, in a solitary and violent dialogue with the shadows that inhabit her mind. There are confused real and unreal, past and future, outer and inner world, dream and hallucination. His thoughts are a circle of hopes, illusions, recriminations, anger, fear and shame.

To translate the changing scenarios that unfold in Else's soul into dramaturgy, the authors have explained the dynamics of apparitions that follow one another in the monologizing structure of the short story. A kaleidoscope of inner voices that is inspired by Schumann's Carnaval , which in every movement chases and deforms a single musical identity, as if in dialogue with its own shadow.

Else's solitude is such precisely because it is inhabited by ambiguous and perverse voices, which call and drag her to remote corners of the labyrinth of the mind, from which it will be impossible for her to return. Freudian hysteria, to use Schnitzler's words, becomes the only form of denial and resistance to the vulgarity of adults that surrounds it and ultimately devours it.

English

Else by Gardella, From (2021/2021), Directed by Cecilia Ligorio,, Conductor Tito Ceccherini, Teatro Ariosto, Reggio Emilia, Italy

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