from the movie Die Puppe by Ernst Lubitsch b/w, 1919

Die Puppe (The doll) is a silent movie of Ernst Lubitsch’s German period, one of the great directors who emigrated from Germany to the USA during Nazism (together with Lang, Von Stroheim and others) and who contributed to the grandeur of Hollywood in the ’30s and ’40s. Die Puppe, a masterpiece of satire and disillusion, in the caustic and subtle style that characterizes Lubitsch’s cinema, explores the themes close to German expressionism and to Hoffman’s romanticism (the double, the psychoanalytic fable, the artificial creature) but overreaching them in an unusual female direction. The film, reworked in video, is post-synchronized and accompanied by the interventions of Marina Giovannini (dance), Letizia Renzini (electronic, voice, instruments), Sabina Meyer (voice, on video).

The challenge, on stage and during the Entr’Acte, is to create a choreography and a symbolic dramatic canvas which face the film’s narration and its technical reworks. On each occasion, the video-cinematographic image will be the counterpoint, the score, the background or an additional active element in the relationship with the performers. On stage, there will be three flesh dolls who will join the two other virtual dolls of the cinematographic narration.
To the film’s ambiguous universe, in which doubled characters act towards an unity identity, corresponds the composite and alien universe of the scene. The Doll’s House designed by Paolo Fiumi, is the symbol and context of a contemporary expressionism through gestural and composition interventions, where images, bodies, voices and music participate in an ironic, dramatic, significant and feminine synthesis.

directed by: Letizia Renzini
choreography: Marina Giovannini
video, live mix: Letizia Renzini
with: Marina Giovannini, Letizia Renzini
voice in video: Sabina Meyer
scenes and drawings: Paolo Fiumi
costumes: Giulia Pecorari
video compositing and animation: Raffaele Cafarelli, Gregory Petitqueux
technique: Claudio Cantini, Federico Del Lungo, Saverio Damiani
drawing lights: Pieter Jurriaanse, Moritz Zavan
production The Venice Biennale, Dance Umbrella
within the ENPARTS project – European Network of Performing Arts
production: Vortice Executive – New Foundation Theater
in collaboration with the City of Venice – Department of Cultural Production, Goethe Institut – Roma, ISR – Swiss Cultural Space in Venice, CAB008
with the support of the European Union Culture Program