Venice Carnival 2000
The Carnival of Venice will celebrate the new millennium with a special edition dedicated to Venice, its history, its present and its future, fantasizing on the thousands of possible simultaneous cities, which the imagination of its citizens and of the world has created. Venice as a place where life continues to be suspended between Memory and Desire.
INVISIBLE CITIES, the book by Italo Calvino, in which Marco Polo tells to the emperor of China about the cities he visited during his journey, will provide the theme for the next edition of the Carnival.
Let us lead you through the City and Memory (History), the Continuous City (Present) or get lost in the City of Desire (Future), or follow the hints of the other possible cities that will be introduced.
Seven invisible conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan
by Produzioni Teatrali Veneziane
Seven evening performances, seven Venetian places that represent seven cities as described by Marco Polo to the emperor of China. A piano, a saxophone player, actors and fantastic settings. Each conversation offers an entry point (a campo, a campiello, or a corte) to the Calvino’s story. Seven performances put together the book’s stories as an imaginary map which leads through the city. Every campo, every corner becomes one of the cities which Marco Polo invented and offers a vision of Venice suspended between past and future passing through the everyday reality of the present. From a concept of Domenico De Clario and Alessandro Bressanello; piano performer Domenico De Clario. Stage design by Marcello Chiarenza; with the performance of La compagnia dei Folli. Directed by Alessandro Bressanello.
CITY AND MEMORY
From its Square to its palaces, from the historical places celebrating Venetian greatness to the inaccessible places that guard the memory of a civilization made of culture and glamour: a journey to relive the spirit and times of great Carnivals of the past. A city which shows its soul only during Carnival but which is the essence of the Venetian myth.
CONTINUOS CITY
“The city refashions itself every day, every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio” (Italo Calvino, Invisible cities).
Venice today is an old metropolis that lives again on a smaller scale through the use of a dialect preserving the taste and expressiveness of its ancient language and through the renewal of its community’s traditions, even if they are often tailored to a turistic dimension. Venice is a university city, where the never ending conflict between generations still renew itself; in this smaller Venice there are many corners still to be discovered and where Pantaloon is still chasing the eternal Colombina.
Throughout Carnival time performances by musicians, jugglers, storytellers, fire-eaters (organized by Circuito Venezia da Vivere) will take place in the following places: Campo San Barnaba, Campo Santa Margherita, Campo San Luca, Campo del Ghetto, Campo San Giovanni e Paolo, Corte dei pali, Strada Nuova.
CITY OF DESIRE
“In every age someone, looking at the City as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, the City was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe. (…) On the map of your empire, O Great Khan, there must be room both for the big stone city and the little cities in glass globes. Not because they are all equally real, but because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so. The others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.” ( Italo Calvino, Invisible cities)
Venice history spans thousands of years but Venice is still a city with endless charm, which makes it belong to the Imagination of the World. Venice is loved, desired, interpreted, refounded, owned, violated, idealized. Venice, a city of thousand hopes that bring together artists and children, Venetians and foreigners, lovers and disappointed people, any human being which has linked this city to their idea of life. Venice of the future (of wishes to come true) permeates yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s city.
