Folia Shakespeariana

Folia is a concert of voices, words, and sounds.
Its time is the night, and its nature is the dream.
Its shape is the circle of the Globe Theatre’s floor plan,
echoing that of Theodoric’s Mausoleum —
places where the living and the dead meet.

Our somewhat forgetful communities often need to create constellations of recurring events which, like lights in the dark, help guide thought and orientation.

Four hundred years after his death, we too light a small candle in homage to the mystery of Shakespeare — whether one imagines a single man or the pseudonym of many.

What is certain is that under his name exist works that, to this day, provoke shifting emotions and transformations.

We attempt to enter the intranatural world suspended between reality and dream, life and death, philosophy and magic — a world conjured by the witches of Macbeth. The silent park surrounding Theodoric becomes their realm, the place where they summon the shadows of major and minor characters escaped from the Master’s plays.

Just as in the Elizabethan era actors found themselves playing female characters on stages forbidden to women, so today two women move freely between male and female roles in a space liberated from gender restrictions — where choices are guided not by the plotlines of stories, but by the intuition of poetic nuclei.

Immersed in a park where the sounds of the city arrive only faintly, we imagine a space where reality and mystery intertwine, breathing new life into magical words that survive time, translation, and every betrayal.

Elena Bucci and Chiara Muti