Sovrimpressioni is a performance piece for a small audience, inspired by Federico Fellini’s 1986 film Ginger and Fred.
As we have been doing for some time now, we have made more than one piece based on the same source. In this case we made three:
Sovrimpressioni, our production Avremo ancora l'occasione di ballare insieme, and the documentary on our work Siamo qui per provare, created with Jacopo Quadri (and Greta De Lazzaris as DoP).
What is Sovrimpressioni? We stole the title from Andrea Zanzotto’s superb collection of poems, and his need to superimpose nature and artifice, mother tongues and neologisms, the way we relate to things and the thoughts flashing into our heads. We have been interested in all of these for some time, in terms of the relationship we have established between biography and fiction; between the figures we chase after in order to get to know ourselves better and the present; and the historical background that weighs on our choices, confuses them, contradicts them, confirms them.
In Fellini’s film, Pippo and Amelia – two artists known for their impersonations of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, who have never come close to success – return to the public eye after years away to appear in a trashy, vulgar television show.
Daria Deflorian and Antonio Tagliarini, after years of working with other artists, return to the stage as the duo that made them famous. They have been successful in their own way, though their prolonged closeness has blurred some of the boundaries between them; their long cohabitation on stage has weakened their friendship, made them spikier in their need to stand out.
Daria Deflorian and Antonio Tagliarini are two performers, writer and directors who, alongside their own personal works, have embarked on an intense and regular collaboration since 2008.
Their first such collaborative work was Rewind, A Tribute to Cafè Muller by Pina Bausch created in 2008 for the Festival Short Theatre of Rome, which subsequently toured various Italian and European festivals. In 2009 they co-wrote, directed and acted in their own production called From A to D and back again, loosely based on Andy Warhol’s similarly titled book for the Palladium Theatre in Rome. Since 2011 they have worked on Progetto Reality (‘Project Reality’) which has morphed into two works: czeczy/cose, (‘things’) an installation/performance first performed at Rome’s Festival Short Theatre in 2011 and Reality, which was commissioned for the Festival Inequilibrio di Castiglioncello in 2012. In Autumn 2012 they were invited to take part in the Teatro di Roma’s ‘Perdutamente’ project which led to their play Ce ne andiamo per non darvi altre preoccupazioni (We’re Leaving So You Don’t Have To Worry Anymore) in December 2012. This work constituted the initial study of a production which premiered in November 2013 for the Festival Romaeuropa where they were joined on stage by two other co-creators/performers Monica Piseddu and Valentino Villa. This play won the Ubu Award 2014 for Best New Italian Dramaturgical Research.
Three of their texts were published by Titivillus 2014 in one edition called ‘Trilogia dell’invisibile‘ (Trilogy of the Invisible). A retrospective of their body of work was then performed with the same title in November 2014 at Teatro India in Rome. In Autumn 2015 Daria and Antonio presentedboth Ce ne andiamo per non darvi altre preoccupazioni and Reality at the Festival d’Automne in Paris.This also marked the beginning of an international tour through France, Swiss, Germany and Canada.
Il cielo non è un fondale (The Sky Is Not a Backdrop) had première in Théâtre de Vidy in Lausanne in November 2016, and continues their research on the relation between the figure and the backdrop, personal and collective history.
Their next project, inspired by the film Il deserto rosso of Michelangelo Antonioni, took the shape of a show for five performers, Quasi Niente (Almost nothing), which has premiered in October 2018, and a performance for non theatrical venues, Scavi.
In 2020 they première their adaptation of the italian translation of the text Who killed my father by french writer Edouard Louis, an they start working on their new project inspired by the film Ginger e Fred of Federico Fellini, which will outcome in 2021 in a duo show, a show for six actors and a documentary.
