Don Giovanni

In our staging of “Don Giovanni” we wanted to invite and challenge rather than provoke and outrage our audience; to suggest multiple and complex questions, rather than offer apparent answers and provide explicit explanations. Our intention was to resist any stable (transparent) reference to historical as well as contemporary reality, but also to refrain / renounce from readings of “Don Giovanni” which crush (and sometimes trash) its referential capacity and suffocate its interpretative breadth. That does not mean, however, that we escaped critical (and social) gestus in some scenes. On the contrary.

In our staging of “Don Giovanni” the singers-actors-characters are dressed in costumes which at the same time cover and uncover the body, just like they move through the space which at the same time hides and exposes, obscures and multiplies, reflects and constraints, re-shapes and cuts (the image of) their bodies, the contours of their identities in a constantly changing arrangement of mirrors. Just like the genre of this fascinating opera (its music and libretto) is defined as a hybrid “drama giocoso”, so does our staging (set, lights, costumes, mise-en-scene, acting) attempt to present the dynamics of life – as both struggle and play, conflict and balance – between body and mind, sexual and spiritual, crime and punishment, betrayal and revenge, love and hate, guilt and innocence, freedom and imprisonment, willpower and weakness, resistance and defiance, tragedy and comedy, reality and – theatre.