Arianna Scommegna, …ÀS

Room 16

For someone born and raised in Milan like me, Testori is what I have tasted since I was a child. His is a marvellous dialect, a Brianza dialect mixed with Latin, Frenchisms, onomatopoeia, a language that is body, earth, perfumes. Three-dimensional, not flat like the Italian of perfect diction.
Arianna Scommegna

“Cleopatras” is an overwhelming declaration of love, death and life. It is one of the “Tre Lai”, the lamentations for the murdered lover, written by Giovanni Testori in the last months of his life. It is the weeping of the Queen of Egypt, here with the Lombard ending «as», a dialectal sign of enormity, contempt and equivalent to the dialect name of Asso in the Brianza region dear to the author, for his «Gran Tugnàs», Antonio. A woman who expresses herself in Testori’s language, which is more extreme than ever, artificial, born from several languages, living and dead, from dialects, from phonetic variants, impervious, obscure but paradoxically “natural” and “clear” in evoking the violence of passions. Guided by Gigi Dall’Aglio’s careful direction, the talented Arianna Scommegna succeeds in giving voice to this material language and to the emotions that pervade it, making it flesh and blood, and on her white costume with blue, green and red colours she draws the geographical place in which Testori makes her live.
Magda Poli

Arianna Scommegna was born in 1973 in Milan, where she lives and works. She graduated from the Civica Scuola Arte Drammatica “Paolo Grassi” in 1996 and in the same year she founded, with a group of fellow students of the academy, the independent theatre association A.T.I.R., with which she carries out her theatrical activities, organising shows, workshops and festivals. The stable and continuous core of the Association consists of fourteen people including actors, director, set designer, costume designer, organiser and technical staff. The artistic direction is by Serena Sinigaglia. Since 2007, the association has managed the Ringhiera theatre, a space in the southern suburbs of Milan, in Gratosoglio. Among the many productions in which it has been involved, the three monologues performed in the last season stand out: Qui città di M by Piero Colaprico, La Molli (divertimento alle spalle di Joyce) and Cleopatràs by Giovanni Testori. On 5 June 2010, the National Association of Theatre Critics awarded her the Critics’ Prize.