With an open heart

Choreography: Claudio Ronda
Choreography Assistant: Federica Iacuzzi
Direction: Alessio Pizzech
Original Music: Paolo Zambelli, performed live by the Giovani Archi Veneti
Consultancy and Dramaturgy: Ermanno Romanelli
Lighting: Nevio Cavina
Costumes and Scenic Elements: Davide Amadei, created by Giulia Zuolo
Sound Technician: Antonio Giaciglio
Dance Company: Fabula Saltica and Elena Croce

Special Thanks: Marina De Liso for providing the voice for the piece “Coeur Ouvert”
Production: Associazione Balletto Città di Rovigo, in collaboration with the Municipality of Rovigo – Teatro Sociale, with the contribution of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities – ArcoDanza Regione del Veneto.

THE SHOW
With an Open Heart is a multidisciplinary performance that blends dance, theater, music, poetry, and dramaturgy. On stage, the narrative flows continuously, closely engaging with themes extracted from William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) Sonnets and specially written pages. The 2016 anniversary of the 400th anniversary of the English author’s death offers actress Elena Croce and six members of the Fabula Saltica dance company an opportunity to shed an unusual light on timeless words and build a new world: in surprise, meaning, and beauty.

Choreography by Claudio Ronda, created on the score composed by Maestro Paolo Zambelli, moves through Shakespeare’s twenty Sonnets, capturing their suggestions to shape bodies transfigured by the poet’s words, bodies transported into a simultaneously earthly and surreal atmosphere that knows no deadlines of Time. These are bodies searching for each other, struggling to surrender; bodies engaged in the aerial and tangible cadence of duets; bodies that, in the elegiac movements of various sequences, trace the rituals of seduction, unlove, and dreams.

In the staging by Alessio Pizzech, a director who emphasizes mutual respect for the identities and specific forms of each expressive medium, the show develops through thematic sections and sudden shifts, even revisited from a distance. With an Open Heart thus becomes a lucid confession of the soul, suspended between biographical fragments, emotional awakenings and disappointments, turmoil and fury, memories, reason, and longings.

Page by page, poem by poem, dance and poetry become mirrored and autonomous narratives, each with its own physicality aimed at the emotional engagement of the audience. The stakes involve a profound meditation on the seasons of Life, the predation and violence of One upon the Other, the myriad illusions, and equally irreparable disillusionments, encapsulated in the roughness and sweetness of that thing called love.

PRESS REVIEWS

ROVIGO OGGI – The Love that Opens the Heart
“…With an Open Heart tells the love of a woman, but it is also the hearts of the audience that are opened by the emotions evoked by the extraordinary show conceived and staged by Alessio Pizzech and Claudio Ronda. A wonderful example of art contamination: poetry, dance, music, and theater. At the theater, one can cry from emotion…”

LA VOCE di ROVIGO
“…dance, text, poetry, and acting have crafted the staging, brought to a white heat of emotions, memories, and dreams. The result has been exalted and imposed in a swing of feelings, fury, illusions, and disturbances that has sparked vivid and engaged anticipation in the audience…”

ITALIA NOTIZIE 24
“…With an Open Heart, in Pisa, is a tribute to Shakespeare. Dance, theater, and live music harmoniously blend on the stage of the Teatro di Pisa in With an Open Heart, an original fusion of art inspired by William Shakespeare’s Sonnets. With an Open Heart hits the mark immediately with the first scene, in simple and magical backlighting, a dancer balancing with a flower in hand on a bench, capturing the audience’s attention, with the music of a violin playing the poignant melody as an integral part of the poetic scene…”

LA STAMPA
“…It creates a captivating auditory and visual experience where acting, movement, melody, and love blend together, highlighting the evocative power of Shakespeare’s rhymes…”