The soul is an essence at the heart of life, yet invisible.
Although it has no apparent volume, it is a moving force.
It is energy.
Often appropriated by religions that load it down with transcendence and imprison within it a limit to freedom, the soul rejects all this (because it has no awareness of it) and spontaneously transforms its energy into matter. It is a creative force.
Only the colours of the soul are visible, and they become so through the surfaces of this matter.
I see a lot of similarities between the Colours of the Soul, the works of Hans Peter Ditzler and the Theatre of Silence from this point of view.
They all have an outer shell that protects their tender poetic heart, made of nothing.
The works created by Ditzler, an artist of the most intimate imagination, are born like the Theatre of Silence out of humble materials of no value whose essentiality lies in their form, simple expressions of an idea. And as they are transformed, they grow. They become superimpositions, and only at the end are we able to see their volumes, which in other circumstances would be arrived at through processes of excavation. Or subtraction.
They are fragile creatures exposed to violence, and for this reason clothed in hard, coloured garments to protect their tenderness.
It is the only way to protect their internal energy, allowing it to be seen and to live.
And to propagate.
Reflected thoughts and at the same time reflections of thought, inviting us on a journey toward places we generally prefer to visit on our own.
Into ourselves.
Theatre as spectacle that comes down from heaven to renew the earth, music and lyrics that bring together actors and spectators and transcend them both. Theatre that generates emotions. Thought that vibrates, making what is communicated sacred.
It allows us to rediscover ourselves. Song and words fly high in the established space. Their forms bear witness to a time that is born of culture and flows back into culture. The exceptional show at Lajatico in the Theatre of Silence transports us to a place that is both ancient and new, in the open air, in the rolling hills, where the semicircle of seats slopes downwards toward the centre, toward the choruses, stages and orchestras. The grand game of communicating emotions comes to life once again at Lajatico.
Exceptional geographic felicity: the earth sloping downward to the centre, the sky opening to the most eloquent of silences, the front of the stage held tightly in the embrace of the immense spaces that lie to each side. Terrestrial truth and celestial energy combine to create this fantastic scenery. Categories are reinvented in this land where aesthetic rigour is united with the liquid modulation of sculptural forms that follow upon one another, from Igor Mitoraj to Arnaldo Pomodoro, Mario Ceroli to Hans Peter Ditzler. The circular shapes and wounds of bronze and stone adapt themselves to the planes and curves, in observance of the notes that will drop down from heaven to alight on the earth. We make Andrea ours, grasping him as an element of synthesis, combining the spectacle of sounds with the sense of his land which calls him back and protects him. Previously inexistent forms come into the world with Ditzler's sculptures and reconvey a value of the eternal to the sense of the ephemeral thanks to its eternal self-renewal. A play of the imagination in which each element arises not from external dilemmas but from areas that lie within art, already existent. The miracle runs through the clumps of earth, commanding our admiration and forcing us to adopt a new way of interpreting and experiencing the world. Andrea arrives on a horse and Ditzler accompanies him in this exaltation of simplicity. The spectator is here. While nature is not always beautiful, it will be saved by the marvel of "form" and "song". The presage of a childhood wonder come true.
A sky open to the most silent of silences, where the liquid modulation of the sonorous forms follows the roundness and wounds of the sculptures, into the midst of which a man arrives on horseback – where the art of sound meets the art of thought – brought to the heights of music, to intensity, duration, frequencies, and timbres. The man sets foot on the land of his childhood, rediscovering the sublimity of its sounds and colours, where the play of imagination arises from internal harmonies.
The musical scale accomplishes its miracles, in a sequence of sounds ordered according to the order of thought and the heart.
Ancestral simple bucolic.