Will you let me fly one day, mom?
And will you wait for my return, sitting by the window?
You‘ll wait for me, won’t you?
Will you wait for me to come home with the air in your hair? Will you stay up all night?
Is it true that you have not forgotten me?
Peter Pan is the story of an absence, of a void that often remains unbridgeable, of a time that escapes our remembrance and that sometimes stops, of experiences that make us grow up unwittingly and too soon. The inspiration comes from the adventures of Peter and Wendy andthesomewhat mysterious atmosphere of the first novel by James Matthew Barrie, Peter Pan in the Kensington gardens where
the autobiographical feeling of an unbridgeable
lack pushes the author to create a parallel world,
a garden first, an island then, where children who have fallen out of prams and have been forgotten
by their parents find themselves in a space without physical and temporal boundaries. And the island
of never again, Neverland, is perhaps inside every child’s head, a place where things forgotten by adults end up, so there is no space in real life. It is here that Wendy manages to find the right distance with her being a child, here that she feels the desire to grow, to leave the island without severing that link with her childhood that struggles to stay with us all our life:
a window that we close upon growing up and that, instead, we should keep open, in contact with our reality and our being adults. With the same ensemble of Diary of an Ugly Duckling, Factory engages in this new creation by going through fundamental themes of growth where dreams, life and death run on the same thread and can both be a great adventure, as Peter puts it.
Since 2010 Factory Compagnia has engaged mainly in the production of shows, realization of international cooperation projects, organization of festivals and shows, and conducting of theater workshops. Formed with the idea of putting together the skills, aspirations, and dreams of artists and friends (Tonio De Nitto, Paola Leone and Fabio Tinella) – the company is in itself a small miracle sprung from European projects, like those that often fade away without leaving any trace. In fact, Factory took its name from an Interreg cross-border project with the Balkans and, in 2011, and within the context of "Teatri Abitati," Theatrical Residence staged A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare, with Italian and foreign actors. The show was chosen to inaugurate the Puglia showcase on stage at the Elfo-Puccini Theater in Milan, and for three seasons was happily welcomed in many Italian theaters until its last performance at the National Theater of Skopje in 2016. With Romeo and Juliet in 2012 it started collaborating with the dramaturg, Francesco Niccolini, who curated the translation and adaptation of the script. This show paved the way to the company’s participation in the programming of theater circuits. Also in the same year, with Cinderella, a dance-theater tout public show co-produced with Tir dance, the company was a guest at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and in Switzerland, Spain and Tunisia, reaping great success as highlighted by critiques and audiences. In 2015 the collaboration with Dramaturg, Francesco Niccolini continued with the debut of The Taming of the Shrew with hosting of the show at the India Theater of Rome and the Festival Primavera Theater of Castrovillari. In 2015, the company created together with the Principio Attivo Company in Lecce, the internationally-inspired KIDS Festival of the arts for future generations, which won for the "Teatro Abitati" the tender to activate theater residency at the Teatro Comunale of Novoli, where it is still a resident. In the same year, also the Theatri della Cupa Festival dedicated to the contemporary scene was established, which immediately became a celebration of the Puglia theatrical community that presents its production in this theater and where many of the sector operators attend the Meetings of the word. Since 2016 the in-depth study of diversity carried out by the company discovered further realities in the encounter with disability. We thus experienced the creation of artistic ensembles composed of disabled and non-disabled actors, with the production of Diary of an Ugly Ducking the second tout public show produced with TIR dance, and which again combined theater and dance. The lead character was the dancer, Francesca De Pasquale, with Down syndrome. After several international tournees (in France, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Montenegro and Iran) in 2017 the show won the City of Kotor Jury Prize and the prize for best performer went to Francesca De Pasquale at the XXV Kotor Festival of Art for Children in Montenegro. In the same year in Hamedan, Iran, at the 24th International Art Theater Festival for Children and Youth, seven of the most prestigious prizes of the festival were awarded to the show: best performance, best music to Paul Coletta, best stage designer to Roberta Dori Puddu, best actor to Luca Pastore, best leading role actress to Francesca De Pasquale, and best playwright and best Director to Tonio De Nitto. Our disappointment in being excluded from the recognition of ministerial companies in 2018, led us to the debut of the new production in a new spirit: The Misanthrope by Moliere with the dramaturgical adaptation of Francesco Niccolini. In parallel, in 2019 the rehearsals of the smaller productions began, and were the fruit of each actor’s desire to place their stakes on their projects. With the support of the company they thus debuted with Run, Daphne!, by and with Ilaria Carlucci, and directed by Alberto Cacopardi, and Mattia and his Grandfather with Ippolito Chiarello, based on the novel by Roberto Piumini, adapted and directed by Tonio De Nitto, and co- produced by Fondazione Sipario Toscana. The show in 2020 won the prestigious Aeolus Award for best show of the year for having proposed to the public with great poetry and delicacy, the difficult theme of death, drawn from the eponymous book of Roberto Piumini.» And again, "for the joyful and gentle interpretation of Ippolito Chiarello, the show moved along Tonio De Nitto’s wise and delicate rewriting of the book. The interpreter's narration took us by the hand, to the company of little Matthew and his grandfather, who had recently passed away, on a fantastic journey through an ever-pulsating scenario, to help us understand in a deeper and poetic way how all the people we have loved will never disappear, and will remain forever inside us». Also in 2019, thanks to an Intereg Italy-Greece international cooperation project, the company staged the show HUBU RE, from the masterpiece of Alfred Jarry's Ubu roi, with 12 Italian and Greek actors with and without disabilities. In 2019, with the same ensemble of the Diary of an Ugly Duckling, the new tout public show, Peter Pan was presented and co-produced by the Fondazione Siparia Toscana, in collaboration with playwright, Riccardo Spagnulo and the choreographies of Barbara Toma. The tournee of the show and the debut programmed at the Festival of Milan in May 2020 were blocked by the outbreak of the coronavirus. Paloma, an offbeat ballad and The Ghost of Canterville had the debut in 2020.
