La ballata dei Lenna (IT)

The show comes to life from the reading of The Pale King, the last novel published posthumously by the American David Foster Wallace, dedicated to the heroic everyday life of a group of officials of the Internal Revenue Service of a provincial town in the USA, with the intention of investigating boredom, and the ability / inability of the human being to survive the bureaucracy. Of The Pale King, a novel left unfinished, following DFW’s suicide, only shreds of unfinished stories remain in which we can glimpse the fragmented existences of the protagonists, and breathe DFW’s torment in trying at all costs to find a meaning to human existence.

Starting from here, La Ballata dei Lenna through a path of identification with the author, has conducted over several months, a search within several offices of the Internal Revenue Service in our country, with the intent to investigate a world that in the common imagination of heroic has very little. The material has produced an original dramaturgy that plays with the fragmentary nature of the novel to give life to a docuteatro that gives, together with the viewers’ eyes, a new sense to the work.

Performance – in Italian

By Paola Di Mitri Directed by Nicola Di Chio, Paola Di Mitri, Miriam Fieno With Nicola Di Chio, Paola Di Mitri, Miriam Fieno Narrator Alex Cendron Lights and visual concept Gennaro Maria Cedrangolo and Eleonora Diana Video and filming Vieri Brini and Irene Dionisio Costumes Valentina Menegatti Production La Ballata dei Lenna Executive production ACTI Teatri Indipendenti Production support Hangar Creatività, ZONA K Milano, Factory Compagnia Transadriatica, Principio Attivo Teatro In collaboration with Scuola Holden

La Ballata dei Lenna is a theatrical research collective founded by Nicola Di Chio, Paola Di Mitri and Miriam Fieno that was founded in 2012 at the Civica Accademia d’Arte Drammatica “Nico Pepe” in Udine, where the three actors trained and graduated. The company’s work focuses on the study of the relationships between the community and its daily life, in an attempt to highlight the points of friction of the contemporary imagination. The idea of theater as a collective representation leads the company to research and use a variety of languages, ranging from the centrality of the actor to its decomposition, from the word to the movement, from sound to image. The three artists ground their work in a perspective that encompasses the art of authorship, the craft of performance, and the role of stage manager.