The dream workshop. At the Spoleto Festival, the first widespread edutainment project on costume.

Spoleto, June 1, 2023 - It is a new Festival project the one developed from Fabiana Giacomotti to corollary to the new staging of Claude Debussy'sopera Pélleaset Mélisande scheduled for June 24 and 25, 2023 at the Teatro Nuovo Gian Carlo Menotti with the Budapest Festival Orchestra conducted from Iván Fischer, who also directs with Marco Gandini, and costumes by Anna Biagiotti.

Articulated in three different moments, The Dream Workshop will include a small comparative exhibition of costumes from performances of Pélleas et Mélisande, from the main national theater museums and made from Italian and foreign designers, on display from June 24 to July 9 in the foyer of the Teatro Nuovo Gian Carlo Menotti. Also scheduled is a morning of study in the theater's Sala XVII settembre, dedicated to professionals and schools of costume and theater with the involvement of the production ofopera, the heads of the Festival's "costume and exhibitions system" and costume and fashion-costume designers such as Arthur Arbesser, costume designer from Oscar Massimo Cantini Parrini, Polimoda director Massimiliano Giornetti, and fashion designer Raffaella Curiel. to This formative moment is followed every Saturday (June 24, July 1, July 8) by a series of workshops in Complesso Monumentale di San Nicolò, by registration, open to the public, to learn the value of costume in the relationship between text and music and learn to create an easy costume/scene accessory that participants can take with them.

"I sincerely thank the Spoleto Festival for allowing me to bring to life to an experimental project to that I have been thinking about from for a long time. The narrative, but also factual, craft value of the theater crafts deserves to be known by the general public," says Fabiana Giacomotti, costume historian and editor of Foglio della Moda, Foglio's monthly fashion industry and culture insert. "Thank you also to all the partners, from Cuoio di Toscana to Ermanno Scervino, Lineapelle and Rubelli who, by making to available beautiful but unused material, make clear the value of reuse and circular economy. A natural practice in theater, but one that thanks to this project we hope will become increasingly common heritage and lifestyle."

The project, which uses bases and materials of the highest quality, is developed in a logic of upcycling: hides, fine fabrics, leather, are in fact scraps, leftovers, offcuts from the processes of making high fashion garments and accessories, and come from Ermanno Scervino's factory, Lineapelle's Prototype Archive, which thanks to its managing director Fulvia Bacchi made the scarselle and which can be finished sewing and decorating in the workshop, the Cuoio di Toscana consortium that provided special design forms from transform into sautoirs or belts.

On the many performances of Debussy's only opera , up to to today many costume designers have tried their hand, one for all Pier Luigi Pizzi with a fabulous staging for La Fenice, created from Tirelli, who made the tradition his own in the fabric of Maria Gallenga, the duo Barbe&Doucet with a staging curated by the Regio di Parma two years ago, a designer known for experimenting between music and fashion, Iris Van Herpen, who was joined from Marina Abramovic in the sets, and Christian Lacroix, whose show, he writes from the house in Arles, is still touring to seven years after its debut, in a rich co-production between the Théatre des Champs Elysées in Paris, theOpera in Dijon and the Capitole in Toulouse.

The project is part of the strategy of enhancing the festival's historical heritage of costumes, images and documents in 2021 and adds to the impressive work of agnition and recovery of the heritage of the event's approximately three thousand costumes, spanning a time frame from the early 1960s to the 2000s.

Once again this year, it is possible to visit the exhibition Sulle tracks di Gian Carlo Menotti, which highlights a human and professional portrait of Maestro Menotti through the display of costumes, posters, prop material, sketches and period photographs.

The exhibition continues with the Festival dei Due Mondi Documentation Center at Casa Menotti, a "treasure chest of memory" that gives form and context to the audio, video and photographic materials of the Festival, and the Giosuè Carducci Municipal Library, which holds the original materials of Festival dei Due Mondi from 1958 to the present.