OHT's 'Curon-Graun' premieres at Teatro Sociale, Trento

The performance 'Curon-Graun. Storia di un villaggio affogato' by OHT-Office for a Human Theatre premiered at the Teatro Sociale in Trento in 2018, after winning the OPER.A. 20.21 Fringe award. The work recounts the 1950 flooding of the village of Curon in Val Venosta, when the construction of a dam merged Lake Resia and Lake Mezzo, submerging 523 hectares of farmland and 163 houses. Only the bell tower of the Church of Sant'Anna remains visible above water. The production, an idea by Filippo Andreatta and Paola Villani (who also designed the set), is produced by the Orchestra Haydn of Bolzano and Trento in collaboration with Centrale di Fies. The orchestra performs live on stage in a trendy-indie atmosphere. The piece uses three narrative modules over 40 minutes of 'musical theatre', exploring landscape as visual dramaturgy. The bell tower is presented as a fetish object, a silent monolith. The first violin concertmaster Stefano Ferrario chose Arvo Pärt's 'Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten' for its solemnity. A witness in the audience remarked, 'I relived everything, as I had lived it then.' The performance references the historical protests against the dam, which were ignored. The text also draws parallels to Bill Viola's use of water and Andy Warhol's 'Empire', though these are not explicitly cited by the director.