For the third year, Luca Ronconi, with the Santacristina Centro Teatrale, is present at Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto: after the lecture-workshop on Ibsen in 2008 and the play Un altro Gabbiano from Chekhov in 2009, he will stage Rafael Spregelburd´s Modesty, one of the most relevant and influential figures on the contemporary Argentine scene, a leading exponent of the generation that formed after the dictatorship. to Forty years his author of more than thirty plays, translated and performed in South America, Europe, and the United States; he is a director, actor, essayist and translator. The show also marks the continuity of Ronconi´s research work with the Santacristina Theater Center, together with Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, MittelFest in Cividale and the Piccolo Teatro in Milan.

The project of the "Hieronymus Bosch Heptalogy" was born in 1996. Spregelburd took his cue from the panel of Hieronymus Bosch′s The Seven Deadly Sins and set out again to write seven short works that would represent the dissolution of modern morality, just as Bosch′s painting photographs the dissolution of medieval morality on the threshold of a yet undefined Humanism.

The seven works that make up the Heptalogy bear titles that designate seven contemporary sins, with an often playful and sneering internal correspondence to traditional sins: Linappetence (Lust); Extravagance (Envy); Modesty (Pride); Stupidity (Avarice); Panic (Sloth); Paranoia (Gluttony); and Stubbornness (Wrath). Rather than a substitution or transformation, it seems to be a summation, in the optic of the fusion of space and time contained in the reading of the universe proper to complexity theory, to which Spregelburd refers at great length: we inherit the sects of the past and generate new sects.

Luca Ronconi stages La Modestia, one of the most ambitious and refined works of the Heptalogy, with which he opens the Theater section of the Festival. The cast of La Modestia includes the extraordinary participation of four outstanding performers of Italian theater: Paolo Pierobon, Maria Paiato, Fausto Russo Alesi and Francesca Ciocchetti, guided by Luca Ronconi′s direction through the multiple change of roles and characters, and in the alternation between the two different stage situations evoked in Spregelburd′s text. In fact, the scene takes place in a single place, an ordinary petty bourgeois apartment where, in continuity, with no passage of time between one scene and another, the 4 actors play 2 autonomous roles that correspond to to two stories taking place in different times and places: today´s Argentina and a country in Eastern Europe, any of yesterday´s Soviet empire. In common, on the scene appear, according to the classic mechanism of the detective story, some clues such as a gun or a mysterious tape that accompany us towards the final deflagration that, by a short circuit, destroys the apartment. Extraordinary opportunity for the actors who have to deal with different characters and worlds, not only playing them, but experiencing "a displacement" that continually calls them into question, in fact entering Spregelburg´s tale as a further sign of our crisis.

"As in any creative process, in thisopera there is a desire to translate a content into a form, and translating always means translating something that is expressed in one language into a different one. Translation involves a series of technical compromises. (...) In The Modesty there are few certainties. The actors and I treated the protagonists of this story with unusual piety. And, in spite of this, although they all embrace Good as an end, nothing could be worse for them. We are also facing to a "comedy of misunderstandings," in the crudest sense of the word, and at the same time, facing to aopera about dialectics, boundaries and the uncertainty of Evil. I also like to think that it speaks of the suspension of nostalgia. About the thirst for change, which comes from the suspension of nostalgia. And of modesty, of course. Modesty as sin. The superb and guilty pleasure that comes from the desperate act of trying to be a little less than one′s self, with the secret goal, to times, of paying in convenient installments this endless doubt."
Rafael Spregelburd

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