Palazzo Magnani hosts an original performance-exhibition, never seen in Italy, that focuses on the concept of the "fourth wall", that is the emotional involvement of the visitor in the story staged.
When a puppet breaks the fourth wall, it gets the audience's trust, giving to the show the power to blur that division between stage and world, between art and life.
Visitors will be welcomed by the life-size costumes designed by Pablo Picasso for Parade, a choreographic ballet that Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes staged in Paris in 1917.
Then a crowd of "high and low" puppets, i.e. manipulated from below, with the hands, or with a stick, from above, from the oldest examples, such as Pulcinella or Harlequin of the Art Comedy, to those of Otello Sarzi, Reggio Emilia citizen by adoption, made with recycled materials. Two festival theatres, set up in the rooms on the ground floor, will allow children to engage with animated theatre, and on weekends it will also be performed by some of the latest Italian puppeteers. On display are the puppets seen through the eyes of the Italian futurists, the Bauhaus artists of the 1920s (Paul Klee, Andor Weininger, Lothar Schreyer, Sophie Täuber Arp and Oskar Schlemmer), the Russian Avantgarde (El Lissitzky, Aleksandra Ekster, Nina Efimova) and the artist Richard Teschner.
The exhibition will be able to charm the youngest visitors and increase the wonder in the adults’ experience, because marionettes and puppets are still now a form of theatre that can make the division between stage and world, art and life, fall away.
