Based on the novel by Lewis Carrol translated by Chiara Lagani and published in 2021 by the publishing house Einaudi, Sylvie e Bruno is a play in which the visionary dimension of the dream takes us out from the ordinary perception of the real life. Fanny & Alexander presents a double story that develops in parallel: on one hand an opposed love affair and, on the other, a "magical" story whose protagonists are Sylvie, a little girl, and her tiny, ungrammatical brother, Bruno. The starting point is that state of half-sleep in which reality is wisely mixed with malleable facts: in that state - partially alert and of semi-abandonment at the same time - the body suddenly becomes heavy, the mind lifts up. In the two worlds something always happens and breaks in to destabilize these dimensions. In fact, a violent coup d'etat has just happened in the magical world, while in the real world rages a terrible mysterious feverl similar to the pandemic that suddenly has showed up in our planet. So, on one hand there is a collapsing world in which the force of beauty and imagination breaks out; on the other, a world - plagued by a terrible, metaphorical disease – that however survives, in the name of the power of love and art.
Fanny & Alexander is an artistic alliance founded in Ravenna (Italy) in 1992 by Luigi de Angelis and Chiara Lagani. Fanny & Alexander produces events from the cultural fusion of different artistic languages, including theatre, visual arts, music, cinema and literature. The Company mainly creates plays, live performances, operas and installations, all drawn from an ever changing network of artists across different disciplines, whose interaction on and off stage gives thought to the relations between tradition and new technologies.
Among their recent and often prize-winners projects are Addio Fantasmi, based on the novel by Nadia Terranova (Einaudi) with Anna Bonaiuto and Valentina Cervi, Storia di un’amicizia (Story of a Friendship), the theatrical version of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, and Se questo è Levi (If this man is Levi), a reenactment of Primo Levi through the remote-acting technique (“eterodirezione”) pioneered by Fanny & Alexander.
