West. 2010

West (2010)

Production Fanny & Alexander, Festival delle Colline Torinesi
Idea Luigi de Angelis and Chiara Lagani
Dj-set Mirto Baliani
Drammaturgy Chiara Lagani
Texts Chiara Lagani and Francesca Mazza
Direction, stage space Luigi de Angelis
With Francesca Mazza
Hidden persuaders Marco Cavalcoli and Chiara Lagani
Debut: Turin, Cavallerizza Reale – Festival delle Colline Torinesi, June 2010.

West. Presentazion

by Alice Fadda
With West we come to the end of the long, intense journey that Dorothy and her alter ego spectator have accomplished together with Fanny & Alexander inside the O-Z project. In West we have the concretization of a breakdown, the breakdown of a woman along with a society. Dorothy, here played by Francesca Mazza, is fifty-two years old and has a long braid, a blue dress with a zipper down the middle, worn over a white T-shirt and jeans, at the feet of the dancers, and of course red and glittery. She is sitting at a table exactly at center stage, an essential square space whose boundaries are set off by white tape glued to the floor.
At the edges of this kind of ring – four klieg lights that never change their intensity or anything else, illuminate the heroine, who never leaves the space, though sometimes she shifts a little by dragging her chair to another part of the stage. The sources of this work are related to Baum’s novel and to the collective imagination from the Victor Fleming film (the blouse worn by Francesca Mazza, for example, has the face of Judy Garland/Dorothy printed on the front ), but it is also based on theories such as the architecture of choice, libertarian paternalism, hidden persuasion and the language of advertising. This material is linked to Francesca Mazza’s personal autobiographical history, which Chiara Lagani used to build the play’s stagecraft.