PANEL 22
Translocating the Performing Arts, and Architecture
Room ?
Beyond Conventional Itineraries: Ugo La Pietra’s Analysis of Urban Space
Martina Tanga – Boston University
In the 1970s, Italian artist Ugo La Pietra explored the act of moving through the urban
environment. He conceived of the city as a place where human beings exist in a state of transience.
Far from neutral, this state is subject to the discourses of spatial construction. La Pietra’s conceptual
practices, as well as his keen interest in architecture, led him to question the very structures that
constitute cities. Through his work, he aimed to decode and disrupt the dominant systems of spatial
organization.
La Pietra’s first and best-known project was his contribution to the exhibition Campo
Urbano, curated by Luciano Caramel in 1969 in Como, Lombardia. In an effort to subvert the
commercialization of the city’s streets, La Pietra built an alternative throughway on Via Vittorio
Emanuele II entitled Allora: copro una strada e ne faccio un’altra (So: I cover one street and I
make a new one). Consisting of a wooden and semi-transparent plastic pyramid, its purpose was to
provide a covered passage for citizens to travel through, while avoiding the sensorial onslaught of
commercial advertising and shop window displays.
La Pietra was particularly interested in discovering instances where conventional spatial
modalities had been circumvented by the working class. In a conceptual anthropological
investigation entitled Gli Itinerari Preferenziali (Preferential Routes), also from 1969, La Pietra
mapped alternative pedestrian paths to the designated sidewalks within Milan’s periphery. La Pietra
saw this subversive gesture as a way of rejecting the dominant spatial structures and reappropriating space.
This paper offers an in depth investigation of La Pietra’s work, an artist barely known
outside of Italy. In particular, Edward Hall’s understanding of the influence of culture on spatial
perceptions and behavior, in the field of proxemics, will offer an important theoretical key to
understanding La Pietra’s artistic experiments. More broadly, this study will offer new perspectives
on social and cultural discourses of transience.
Translating Rilke and his Duino Elegies to the Stage
Meagan Tripp – University of Minnesota
This paper examines a ballet, which recently premiered at the Nationaltheater Mannheim, as
a new and ephemeral translation of Rilke’s Duineser Elegien. In a review of the premiere, an article
in the Main-Spitze placed the ballet in the tradition of the numerous translations of the Elegies:
“Nationaltheater Mannheim übersetzt Rilkes ‘Elegien’ in die Sprache des Tanzes” (Klemm). The
notion expressed in the article’s title expands upon the concept of translation, moving beyond the
pragmatic purpose of crossing cultural and linguistic boundaries. Choreographer Dominique
Dumais not only translates the Duino Elegies into ballet; she stages a dancer portraying Rilke
himself. By translating the poet to the stage, Dumais allows dancers and the audience a physical
awareness of his presence while calling forth the artistic engagement two-fold: the ballet shows
Rilke engaged with his time and poetic elements; the performance, as a translation event, involves
an engagement with him and his texts.
An examination of key metaphors and aims of translation found in the theories of Walter
Benjamin, as well as ideas in Rilke’s letter to one of his translators reveals similarities between
more conventional translations and the choreographic translation of Rilke’s poetry. Translation of
literature is driven by a sense of love and respect for the work; it aims to draw close to its object,
engaging it as both object and subject, opening the text. This gesture of opening or unfolding affects
the text and the translating language or medium. A balletic translation to the stage transcends
linguistic boundaries, invests a poetic text with (after)life beyond the page, creates a community
around the translation, and provides a lens for considering what constitutes the language of dance
performance.
“Muy Lindo Ingegner Fiorentino”1:
Baccio del Bianco and Italianate Scenography in the Court of King Philip IV of Spain
Pamela Kierejczvk Thielman – Graduate Center (CUNY)
The historical narrative of scenic design from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century
is one of Italian domination. The rediscovery in Italy of Vitruvius’ De Architectura and the advent
of perspective drawing led to scenic experimentation, culminating in perspective settings in the
early 1500s. Dignitaries visiting Italian courts witnessed incredible spectacles, and the designers
that created them became a sought after commodity in other nations. Baccio del Bianco was one
such designer. A Florentine, trained under one of the leading designers of the period, he was sent to
the court of King Philip IV of Spain in 1651 by Medici Grand Duke Ferdinand II.
Baccio del Bianco’s extant designs, in particular a full set of drawings for Andrómeda y
Perseo by Pedro Calderón, show that he worked firmly in the Italianate style. However, I argue that
rather than importing a foreign and fixed style, del Bianco was also encountering and being changed
by Spanish culture. I examine the drawings from Andrómeda y Perseo with an eye to disrupting the
narrative of Italian scenographic dominance, instead positing a history of encounter and exchange
between Italian designers and the foreign courts in which they lived and worked, using the theory of
“transculturation” first articulated by Fernando Ortiz.
By defining Spanish theatrical culture as peripheral to metropolitan Italian theatrical culture,
I employ “transculturation” to explore the encounter between the two as a process of negotiation. A
close reading of the drawings, with the play text, shows how working with Calderón informed and
challenged Baccio del Bianco’s ideas about theatrical design and brought about subtle shifts in
practice. The example of Andrómeda y Perseo presents a microcosm of the Spanish theatre under
the influence of “transculturation,” as local practices met imported forms and a new style of Spanish
court spectacle came into being.
Filippo Baldinucci records that this as the delighted response of King Philip IV to Baccio del Bianco’s first effort at
the Coliseo at Buen Retiro palace.
1
Translating a “Whole” Life: Re-Presenting Charlotte Salomon’s Life?or Theatre?
Marnie Christensen - University of Minnesota
“Keep this safe. It is my whole life.” With these words, Charlotte Salomon entrusted her
autobiographical life's work, a series of more than 1300 paintings titled Life? or Theatre?, to a
family friend for safekeeping. Shortly thereafter, she was deported to Auschwitz and killed. Today
Salomon's work serves as both an archive of her life and a document of her time, mixing personal
themes such as her family's history of suicide and her first love affair with the broader political
realities affecting Jewish life under Nazi rule. The work is remarkable for its enormous size and the
ways in which it transcends the boundaries of genre. Musical leitmotifs accompany the characters,
and allusions to the theater suggest it was ultimately intended for the stage. Given the work's size
and complexity, it is nearly impossible to present Life? or Theatre? in its entirety. Thus any attempt
to bring Salomon's work from the archives into the public sphere involves making choices about
which aspects of her story will be told and how.
This paper considers these choices in light of the first published collection of Salomon's
paintings, the 1963 book Charlotte: A Diary in Pictures. The translation of Salomon's work into the
diary form shapes the selection of images and radically alters our encounter with her work. Whereas
Life? or Theatre? is expansive, the diary serves to contain Salomon's work, presenting it as a
Holocaust narrative in accordance with the norms of Holocaust representation at the time. By
comparing the impulses behind the creation of both the work and its translation and considering the
ways in which the diary format shapes our understanding of Salomon's work as a whole, I seek to
identify the stakes involved in translating a “whole” life from one form to another.