Luca Ronconi

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Luca Ronconi (born March 8, 1933 in Sousse , Tunisia , French North Africa , † February 21, 2015 in Milan ) was an Italian theater director .

Life

Luca Ronconi, born in Tunisia, where his mother taught literature, trained as an actor at the Accademia d'Arte Drammatica in Rome until he graduated . He then took part in productions by Luigi Squarzina , Orazio Costa and Michelangelo Antonioni . Since 1963 first experiences as a director. Ronconi's international breakthrough came in 1969 with Orlando Furioso in Ariost . This work has not only been shown throughout Italy, but also worldwide in guest performances. In 1973 a film version was also made under Ronconi's direction.

Between 1975 and 1977 Ronconi directed the theater section of the Biennale of Venice . In 1979 he founded and headed a theater laboratory in Prato . From 1989 to 1994 he directed the Teatro Stabile in Turin , after which he was appointed director of the Teatro di Roma . At the beginning of 1999 he succeeded Giorgio Strehler as artistic director of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan .

Ronconi was next to Strehler as the most important Italian director of the 20th century. His productions were characterized by intellectually precisely penetrated concepts, which are also reflected in the mostly elaborate stage structures - this director is not the protagonist of a “poor theater”. Ronconi regularly presented productions that ignored spatial - for example in industrial buildings - or temporal limits - by exceeding the usual performance duration. The importance of the set design for his productions led Ronconi to collaborate with the most important Italian scenographers, including Pier Luigi Pizzi , Luciano Damiani and Ezio Frigerio . In this regard, the cooperation with the architect Gae Aulenti , whom he inspired and used to create furnishings, was of particular importance .

His work covered a broad repertoire that spanned from the Renaissance to the modern age, with his repeated interest in the theater of antiquity. In addition to numerous productions in Italy, Ronconi has repeatedly worked at major theaters in Austria ( Wiener Burgtheater , Salzburg Festival , Wiener Festwochen ), Switzerland ( Schauspielhaus Zürich ) and France ( Comédie-Française ).

Ronconi has been an opera director since the late 1960s. Here, too, he devoted himself to a repertoire that ranged from Claudio Monteverdi to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Wagner to Karlheinz Stockhausen . Ronconi has always committed himself to an anti-realistic musical theater, which he saw as being in contrast to the principles of spoken theater. A psychological foundation of the acting performances of opera singers was unimportant to him, rather he tried to bring the respective work into context with the time it was composed and the current situation. In Richard Wagner's Die Walküre, he located the events in interiors of the 19th century oppressed by nature and industry, and Il viaggio a Reims by Gioachino Rossini showed an opera theater that was surrounded by paparazzi and saved itself in anarchist merriment.

As part of the 2006 Winter Olympics , Ronconi was responsible for part of the cultural program. Under the title Domani (Morning), in collaboration with the Teatro Stabile of Turin, five plays involving 68 actors were performed in different locations: Troilus and Cressida by Shakespeare (February 2nd to March 11th); War games by Edward Bond (February 3 to March 12); Il silenzio dei Comunisti (The Silence of the Communists) by Vittorio Foa , Miriam Mafai , Alfredo Reichlin ; Lo specchio del diavolo (The Devil's Mirror) based on a text by Giorgio Ruffolo (February 6th to March 5th); Biblioetica. Dizionario per l'uso (Biblioethics. Dictionary of use) by Gilberto Corbellini , Pino Donghi , Armando Massarenti (February 14th to March 12th).

For the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence , Ronconi staged a new production of Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff (conductor Zubin Mehta ) (premiere May 12, 2006). In autumn 2006 Ronconi designed a new production of Giacomo Puccini's Turandot for the Teatro Regio in Turin (premiere October 10). In protest against the subsidy cuts for the Italian theaters, the stage design and costumes were waived. The stage was only varied by its existing technical equipment (e.g. by lowering it), a lifting crane was also used, and a sophisticated lighting design was added. The singers acted in everyday clothes.

In 1998 Ronconi was awarded the European Theater Prize, in 2008 he received the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize .

Directorial work

(Selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Italian theater director Luca Ronconi has died
  2. ↑ Biography of Luca Ronconi on the homepage of the Piccolo Teatro (Italian) ( Memento from February 24, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Ronconi, Luca
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian director
DATE OF BIRTH March 8, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Sousse , Tunisia
DATE OF DEATH February 21, 2015
Place of death Milan