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Luciano Damiani

 

Piccolo Teatro, ''El nost Milan'', 1955 The work that for more than twenty years Luciano Damiani develops beside Giorgio Strehler at the Piccolo Teatro contributes to do of it one of the more important theatrical institutions to the world.Amongst the installations that he realized, littre by little more stylized and innovative ...
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... one must mention at least:El nost Milan, 1955 / 1956The Good Person of Szechwan, 1957 / 1958, 1961 / 1962Le baruffe chiozzotte, 1964 / 1965, 1973-74Il campiello, 1974 / 1975, 1977 / 1978
Piccolo Teatro, ''Life of Galileo'', 1961 Luciano Damiani recalls in Curtains of a self-portrait:«In Life of Galileo the scene began out of the stage and a truss drawn by Leonardo da Vinci framed the portal aloft.Under the front of the stage ...»
«... the machine of the curtain by Nicola Sabbatini, scenographer of the seventeenth century.The stage floor was the only perspective element, with an accented inclination in the container with orthogonal plan.Five beams departed from the truss ...»
«... to end against the wall in the background.The one in the middle was calculated so that they all five resulted similar in the volume.The purpose was to avoid the ''protagonism'' of the central beam that one can find in Paolo Uccello's works. The scene had to result to the eye of the audience ...»
«... on the same level, like a ''sheet of paper'' where the characters would be hacked without their own shades and without brought shades, and this was the idea and the great difficulty, but also the beauty.»At the end of the Sixties Damiani has frequent and not concretized contacts ...
... with the cinema.Federico Fellini would like to submit him the scenography of his famous unrealized movie, Il viaggio di Mastorna.Peter Glenville calls him for The Man of the Mancha, but after some pre-production tests the project is abandoned, however, during the tests for the scenography Damiani experiments a large semi-transparent silk veil ...
... hovering in the wind.The idea is not appreciated, but not all is lost, because the veil will often appear in Damiani's next production, becoming almost an obsession.Damiani himself includes it in a graphic representation of his scenographic and theatrical conception in which the silk veil of The Man of La Mancha has a position of absolute importance.
After having frequented the courses of Giorgio Morandi at the Accademia di Belle Arti in his own city, Luciano Damiani (Bologna 1923 - Rome 2007), scenographer, costume designer and stage director, founds an agency specialized in the realization of poster for cinema and works in Bologna as a stage designer at the Teatro Comunale and for the theatrical group La Soffitta of Sandro Bolchi, until, in 1952, noticed by Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler, he begins his collaboration with the Piccolo Teatro, that will be assiduous up to the last Seventies.
Soon Damiani developes a personal scenographical vision that, in theatre, brings him to demolish the traditional conception of the scena all'italiana.
The border of his scenographies, that never are explanatory or illustrative, is not anymore that of the stage, that is dilated at times until to invade the stalls, or almost emptied, with results of exceptional poetic significance.
Among his most prestigious international acknowledgement, there is the life nomination as a titular of the chair of scenography at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
In 1982 he founds in Rome the Teatro di Documenti, that will become his artistic and spiritual will.

Video & Documentation

Materials used in this production

Piccolo Teatro, ''Life of Galileo''

Prose theatre

Piccolo Teatro, ''The Cherry Orchard''

Prose theatre

Piccolo Teatro, ''The Tempest''

Prose theatre

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