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Emanuele Luzzati

 

Emanuele Luzzati with one of the characters that he created. Frequently in his work he choices to use bidimensional characters and scenographic elements, alluding to the figurative world of the infancy, recalled often also in the installation made for the adult public.Luzzati is grown in a Genoese family of Jewish religion, even though substantially secular, as he remembers: «It was an Italian-style Judaism, very Italian, very milk-and-water», he himself remembers in La mia scena è un bosco ...
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... by Andrea Mancini, from which all the following quotations are also taken.In any case, the influence of the Jewish world on his artistic formation is undeniable, even if Luzzati drew out of it, above all, what he found to be more congenial for him:«In every culture there are many sides, I have perhaps taken the most cheerful one.»In the image, litho-screen printing for Yom HaAtzmaut, Independence Day of the State of Israel.
The Signor Bonaventura, one of the most beloved characters of the Corriere dei Piccoli (an historical publication companion of readings of at least three generations of Italian children), is the first among the references of Luzzati's work.«If you look for a dad of my tales, you find him in another tale, that is Bonaventura by Sergio Tofano.He was also very important at a scenographic level because he was ultramodern, he was not uprooted by the trends ...»
«... in the project of the scenes and costumes.I think he was influenced by Futurism.The element of modernity was very synthesized in his scenes, with very beautiful and really simple costumes too.More than in the scenography I feel him to be a father in the illustrations, he was important as a creator of images, of illustrations, of rhymes.A character like Bonaventura ...»
«... did not exist before him.»In the photo: The Three Fat Persons, by Jurij Karlovič Oleša, production of the 1978 by the Teatro della Tosse in which the scenography and costumes seem in some way to refer to Bonaventura, futurism and expressionism.In 1938 Luzzati interrupts his studies because of the racial laws ...
... of which this is the announcement in an Italian newspaper of the time, and he decides to devote himself to drawing.In 1940 his parents, refugeed in the Langhe, sent him to Lausanne, to the École des beaux arts, where he completed his own academic formation.In Switzerland Luzzati meets other refugees with whom he will set up the first theatrical show and among them ...
... there are Alessandro Fersen, Aldo Trionfo, Guido Lopez, who will be part of the history of Italian theater direction in the 1900s.In the image, the escape of the inhabitants of Lausanne during an air raid in a repertory video of Radio Télévision Suisse.Luzzati begins the post-war period by touring Italy to show his designs ...
... looking for job. «At one point I was also in Milan at the Teatro alla Scala to meet Nicola Benois.He told me that they were missing the costume for Der Rosenkavalier, I made the sketches and they were all right: so, the first thing I did in Italy was a show for the Teatro alla Scala.Naturally, at that time I didn't give it any importance, it was a place that seemed to me for old people.»
The scenography and perhaps even more the Nineteenth Century's Italian illustration see in Emanuele Luzzati (Genoa 1921-2007) one of the authors that have more influenced them.
In Luzzati, the creation of the scene uses almost exclusively traditional materials, often in a conventional way.
Light and transparency games don't have a primary importance, that is left instead to the voluntarily approximate compositions made of cloths, platforms, passages and booby-traps that underline with their apparent precariousness a sense of ephemeral that pervades and characterizes the scenography.
The fantastic illusion appears instead, in an inimitable way, on the backdrops and on the panels painted with the unmistakable pictorial graphic sign that becomes the leading motif of all of his shows.
The quotations and most of the pictures here showed are taken from the book La mia scena è un bosco (My Scene is a Wood) (Titivillus Publisher, 2003), that exposes an articulated interview by Andrea Mancini in which Luzzati looks back at his own artistic and private life.

Websites that collect and illustrate the legacy of Emanuele Luzzati:
Fondazione Luzzati - Teatro della tosse
Casa Luzzati
Gianini e Luzzati

Materials used in this production

Teatro Carlo Felice, ''The Elixir of Love''

Lyric opera

Teatro Carlo Felice, ''The Magic Flute''

Lyric opera

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