Giulia Rossena

lorenzopuntoponte [at] gmail.com

I was born in Rome, raised between Palermo and Milan.

I graduated in Classics literature at the Catholic University of Milan thinking that I would be a literature professor. Then I started a course of theater and I decided to look for a different relationship with words. Therefore I went to study Theater Direction at the Paolo Grassi Civic School in Milan. Among the most precious meetings for my artistic and professional growth I count Mariano Furlani, Maurizio Schmidt, Carmelo Rifici, Marco Maccieri, Renata Molinari, Davide Carnevali, Giuliana Musso, and Claudio Autelli. From each of them I have stolen and I continue to steal. After my studies I started working as an assistant director at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan and at the Teatro Franco Parenti with Andrée Ruth Shammah. These were the years of my apprenticeship, in which I began to understand how a theater stage is made and who its inhabitants are.

I’ve directed prose theater and opera shows. Sometimes I feel the need to write the stories I tell myself, sometimes I work with the words of Others.

In 2018, together with Maddalena Massafra, Clio Sciro Saccà, Marco Sinopoli, we won the Macerata Opera Festival 4.0 competition for the writing and composition of a contemporary opera. In 2022, I received the 3rd prize of the EOP – European Opera Prize for Directors, together with Alice Benazzi and Giulia Rossena. In 2023, we won the 13th edition of the EOP – European Opera Award for Directors.

From that shame, impotence and pain, something was born that I believe was the desire to become a poet, that is, to be able to express what it means to feel regret for someone, to have been loved, to be alone.
Stig Dagerman

Alice Benazzi

Giulia Rossena

Emanuele Agliati

Rosabel Huguet Dueñas

Praxis

Lara Ilaria Braconi

Arbaro

Gli Asini

Idomeneo, re di Creta Once we won't be great Good for Nothing You Are Agatha Confabulazioni

Idomeneo, re di Creta

  • Libretto Father Giambattista Varesco after the play by Danchet

  • Music Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  • New production Opéra national de Lorraine

  • OPERA NATIONAL DE LORRAINE ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS

  • Conductor Jakob Lehmann

  • Stage director Lorenzo Ponte

  • Set design Alice Benazzi

  • Costumes Giulia Rossena
  • Lighting Emanuele Agliati

  • Lighting assistant Alessandro Manni

  • Chorus master Guillaume Fauchère

  • Assistant conductor William Le Sage

  • Idomeneo Toby Spence damante Héloïse Mas

  • llia Siobhan Stagg
  • Electre Amanda Woodbury
  • Arbace Léo Vermot-Desroches
  • The High Priest* Wook Kang
  • The Voice of Neptune Louis Morvan
  • Cretan women® Inna Jeskova and Séverine Maquaire
  • Trojans Yongwoo Jung and Jinhyuck Kim Distant chorus Yongwoo Jung, Ill Ju Lee, Jinhyuck Kim and Christophe Sagnier
  • Meda Rosabel Huguet

*Opera Chorus soloists

Muths have different versions. After World war II, Christa Wolf began to rewrite myths from a perspective that questions the hegemony of the fathers. In 2023 the story of Idomeneo still need to be questioned: men and women are in the hands of the gods, the choices of a king are blamed on a monster, human sacrifice is acceptable and love is told as a tool capable to heal everything.

We start from the conflict with which the opera ends: God apparently solves everything for everyone except for a single character. Electra cries out that joy and love have been stolen from her. What is the crime for which she pledges revenge? I believe there has to be something deeper than the love of Idamante. There is a hidden violence in this family. The sacrifice of the child is presented as an accident. Whereas this sacrifice, this violence are the very foundations of the city.

The opera is totally missing references to the Queen of Crete, wife of Idomeneo and mother of damante. It is even difficult to trace its presence in other literary sources. Her name was Meda and she was killed for treason. What was the betrayal that cost her a damnatio memoriae? Meda was killed because she saw, because she knew on which crime Crete lays: the perpetual abuse of the child by the Father. Around Idomeneo and his family there is a culture that accepts and celebrates the sacrifice. In our staging we are in the 60's. The Great Priest and the sacrifice will be represented as parts of the Christian liturgy, the religion of the Father.

The killing of the children has already taken place when Idomeneo abused of them. Religion hides the truth and keeps the horror away from men and women. The abuse is possible because there is a community who tolerates it. The chorus plays the families that live nearby Idomeneo. They want a peaceful life, which is threatened by the pain of these children, and therefore they need a rite which heals and restore peace. Electra is the one who reopens the wound. She is a 30/35 years woman of the 80's who will travel through memory to find responsibilities; she will see and show us again Queen Meda and therefore a possibility of a real new order based not on violence and sacrifice, but on the protection of the weak.

The set tell this trip into memory through the means of analogical photography. The work on the memory becomes the work of developing a picture. The narrative passages will be marked by the photographic process. We will start from a family album from which the body of the mother is deleted and we will see the mother's face at the end of the opera.

Christa Wolf wrote: "Little by little, when you begin to know, you begin to remember too. Knowing and remembering are the same thing". While the story of Varesco goes along, the staging puts the words and the actions of the characters under a different light. This story is told from the perspective of a woman who is thought to be insane. This is a story about the value of testimony, about memory and responsibility.

September - October 2023

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