Dream Lab. The excellent handicraft education project of the Festival dei Due Mondi

After the great success of last year's edition, the upcycling and excellent craftsmanship education project The Dream Workshop returns again for the 67th edition of Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, enriched. Symbology and art of theatrical costume. Once again, Guest speakers and visiting costume designers of the project will be some of the biggest names in Italian and international fashion and costume such as Massimo Cantini Parrini, Gianluca Falaschi and Antonio Grimaldi. Thanks to them, the audience and students will be involved in a series of meetings, to which will be followed, upon registration and for a limited number of participants, by a workshop where they will make and treat themselves to a small accessory created by the guest designers, under the guidance of the premiere theatrical tailors. The project, conceived from Fabiana Giacomotti, costume historian and editor of the "Foglio della Moda" - fashion culture and industry insert of the "Foglio" - is part of the path of enhancement of the theater crafts undertaken by the Festival under the artistic direction of Monique Veaute and includes the exhibition of costumes designed in 1984 from Ulisse Santicchi for the staging of Ariadne auf Naxos, in the foyer of the Teatro Nuovo Gian Carlo Menotti. Richard Strauss'opera opens this edition, directed and conducted by Iván Fischer and costumes by Anna Biagiotti, and the staging, also enhanced from historical images broadcast in totem poles, is designed to allow viewers to compare different approaches to the theme.

The first "Dream Workshop" is scheduled for the opening weekend. to talking about the relationship between fashion and theatrical costume, on Saturday, June 29, at at 11 a.m. at the garden of Palazzo Campello, is a leading figure on the international scene such as Massimo Cantini Parrini, internationally renowned costume designer several times nominated for an Academy Award. On Sunday, June 30, from 10:45 a.m. to 1 p.m., at the Complesso Monumentale di San Nicolò, upon registration (mandatory, at www.festivaldispoleto.com) and for a maximum of thirty people at three successive times, the guest designer coordinates the Creative Upcycling Workshop, joined by the Chiroteca Business Network, a prestigious Neapolitan institution active in the enhancement of the guantaia tradition, and the Sartoria Teatrale del Festival di Spoleto. Inspired by the theme and historical setting of Ariadne auf Naxos, participants are invited to develop their manual skills and sense of style in the creation of a pair of gloves.

On Saturday, July 6, at at 10 a.m., at the garden of Palazzo Campello, it will be the turn of Gianluca Falaschi, costume designer and director for some of the world's most important theaters, and couturier Antonio Grimaldi, star of Hollywood red carpets. It will be an opportunity to listen to a reflection around the theme of the representation of the self and the other from self in Christoph Willibald Gluck's "Orpheus and Eurydice," the'opera protagonist of the second weekend, directed by Damiano Michieletto and conducted by Antonello Manacorda. The Creative Upcycling Workshop continues into the second weekend with appointments on Sunday, July 7, from at 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., at the San Nicolò Monumental Complex. Gianluca Falaschi and Antonio Grimaldi are joined from Marco Piras, professor of Accessory Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, and the Spoleto Festival's Theater Tailoring. In a reinterpretation between fashion and costume of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, participants are invited to enhance remnants of haute couture fabrics and leather manufacturing by transforming them into elegant objects for themselves.

On Saturday, July 13, from at 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., also at the San Nicolò Museum Complex, Barbara Ricchi, a master craftswoman from Tuscany, will instead hold a seminar and workshop (registration required) on the art of costume design for ballet, ideally flanking the highly anticipated performance by Wayne Mc Gregor, director of the Biennale Danza and "resident choreographer" of the Royal Ballet of London, who at Festival dei Due Mondi presents the choreographic diptych Deepstaria, in which choreographic research meets the creative potential of emerging technologies.

The "Dream Workshop" project has the valuable support of UNIC Lineapelle, Cuoio di Toscana, the Antonio Grimaldi atelier, Giorgio Linea, and Mazzanti Piume, and represents the evolution, at once cultural and artisanal, of upcycling, the valorization of existing materials.

As Monique Veaute says, "the project enriches the artistic proposal of the Festival. It was a great pleasure for me to accept Fabiana Giacomotti's proposal and to make to available to the public the opportunity to discover how the clothes and objects we see on stage are conceived and made, as well as to get involved in the first person and take an "active" part in the Festival. The involvement of leading high fashion personalities is yet another way to make the city a living place of artistic creation."

"In the complex system of fashion and costume, seemingly inaccessible to those who are not part of it, The Dream Workshop represents an opportunity to discover how culture and manual skills interact in creation," says Fabiana Giacomotti. "At the same time," she adds, "working with waste from the production of fashion excellence allows us to give new life to materials seemingly without a future. For millennia, wasting resources has been considered a sin and heresy, an offense against Creation. In our hyper-consumerist society, this sense of preservation and enhancement has been lost.This project, though small in numbers, aims to solicit the sensitivity of all of us on this issue so relevant to the preservation of the planet. Maximizing the use of resources."