Giorgio Battistelli - Experimentum Mundi

Experimentum Mundi is a music theatre work for sixteen artisans, four natural female voices, a percussionist and an actor. As the captions to the illustrations of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Enlightenment Encyclopédie describing the tools and the trades represented on the stage are recited, a veritable village of sounds arises page after page. The work is about Giorgio Battistelli’s home town, Albano Laziale, and about those who live and work there who, in Experimentum Mundi perform their own professions, occupations that are today on the brink of disappearing: the baker, the cobbler, the knife sharpeners, the carpenters, the coopers, the blacksmiths, the pavers, the stone-mason, the bricklayers, some accompanied by their wives, who make up the women’s choir. At the end of the performance, each artisan makes his own artefact on stage, in perfect synchrony with the musical and theatrical timings of the score, in a game of interlocking timbres and rhythms that extol the gestures moulded by an ancient tradition. It is a dramaturgy of work, a rite propitiating the halting of time, homage to a personal theatre of the memory.