Alice Sinigaglia tackles Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel in a theatrical project between a psychedelic journey and a PhD. A gigantic show invites us into a strange and provocative world, a theatrical journey that explodes the mechanisms of the comic and the grotesque. Amid laughter and paradoxes, one enters Pantagruele’s mouth, searching for a reality that defies logic and aesthetic perception, and where a hymn to the freedom of imagination, to the chaos that becomes beauty, comes to life. “Laughing at the ugly and the disabled, studying with great proficiency that greedy mess that is the world, we, philosophers of stupidity, a joke consortium, reserve the pleasure of presenting our useless scribble on the different and the equal, nothing more than a one-dimensional variation of the eternal variation of all dimensions. To you, our fat delirious whim – our gigantic spectacle – our incomprehensible lesson in aesthetics,’ writes the director.
Alice Sinigaglia (La Spezia, 1996) graduated in directing from the Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi in 2022. Since 2017, she has been working with Scarti ETS from La Spezia. She wrote and directed Domino (Special Mention at the Premio Scenario Infanzia 2018) and Il Canto del Bidone (finalist at the Premio Scenario 2021). After her graduation, she worked as an assistant director alongside Serena Sinigaglia, Manuel Renga, Giovanni Ortoleva, and Carmelo Rifici. She directed Funerale all’Italiana, a monologue by Benedetta Parisi, which premiered at the Festival delle Colline Torinesi in 2022. Since 2021, she has been the artistic director of the Under 35 theatre festival Tutta la vita davanti – festival di teatro per vecchi del futuro within Fuori Luogo La Spezia. Together with Davide Sinigaglia, she wrote and performed Concerto fetido su quattro zampe, a show that won the Powered by Ref grant and debuted at Romaeuropa in the autumn of 2023. In 2024, she will direct Madri by Diego Pleuteri, a production by Corte Ospitale, supported by the SIAE Fund promoted by the Ministry of Culture. During the 2023/24 season, she will work as a dramaturg on Sorry for What by Giulia Spattini and L’Estasi della Lotta by Carlotta Viscovo and Angela Demattè.
Direction: Alice Sinigaglia
Text: Elena C. Patacchini and Alice Sinigaglia
On stage: Emma Bolcato, Lorena Nacchia, Giorgio Pesenti, Caterina Rosaia, Davide Sinigaglia
Music: Gloria Clemente and Davide Sinigaglia
Illustrations: Davide Faggiani
