A long applause of enthusiasm resounded in the National Theatre in Rijeka for the multilingual and multicultural acting and production team of the play Mountain Giants /I giganti della montagna!
Next to Italian language on the Rijeka CNT stage that the audience are used to listening to, you could hear another four ones, with surtitles in Italian and Croatian language, namely, Slovenian, Albanian, Hungarian and German language, sentence by sentence, two languages in a sentence, in a monologue, in a dialogue. There are no minorities, there is no illusion of freedom, it actually is here. Not even the stage is a frontier. What the audience testified about it: “The part of the play that is between reality and dream is excellent”, ”The performance has delighted me, its music first of all”, “A real Magelli performance”, “I admire the actors”, “I think that the text is a full hit for a project like his one, which comprises the wiping out of frontiers, being a dream of many of us, yet the one we consider impossible. Some lose faith and leave the country. And then, such a performance is realised in its most wonderful form on the stage of the city of diversity”, “To play, to be free as children are, to believe. The strength, an enormous strength accompanied by the belief that so much is possible, all of this I take with me after this performance”, “In the beginning it was hard to follow. But, once I got used to multilingualism – I could enjoy! I’m really amazed by the realisation of this performance”, “The performance with its idea is bigger than the world”, “I’m fascinated as the performance has moved me deeply”.
A unique project conceived as a co-production of five national minority theatres, in co-production of the Rijeka CNT Italian Drama with the German Theatre of the City of Timișoara (Romania), Slovene Permanent Theatre in Trieste (Italy), National Institution Albanian Theatre Skopje (Macedonia) and the Hungarian Theatre Kosztolányi Dezső from Subotica (Serbia) was created as a central part of the programme “(Re)discovering Europe”, the first of the projects of the direct co-operation of the CNT Ivan pl. Zajc and the ECoC 2020, being the first Rijeka CNT project to be co-financed by the European Union fund Creative Europe.
The universal language of the theatre art on the stage of the National Theatre was realised in the performance Mountain Giants/I giganti della montagna, the last work of the Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello, in the direction of Paolo Magelli, dramaturgy of Željka Udovičić Pleština, music by Ivanka Mazurkijević and Damir Martinović Mrle, set design by Aleksandra Ana Buković and Lorenzo Banci and costume design by Manuela Paladin Šabanović. The lighting was designed by Dalibor Fugošić, the associate director was Barbara Babačić, documentarist Ivna Bruck, while Frano Đurović helped in making arrangements and writing sheet music. The cast features Valentina Banci, Mirko Soldano, Anikó Kiss, Giuseppe Nicodemo, Daniel Dan Malalan, Xhevdet Jashari, Mauro Malinverno, Boris Kučov, Fisnik Zeqiri, Doroteja Nadrah, Richard Hladik, Silvia Török and Ivna Bruck.
Reruns of Mountain giants/I giganti della montagna at 18 hours on 3 March and at 19:30 hours on 6, 7 and 8 March. The performance team will be taking its big and spirited trampoline on their journey to Trieste in Italy, to Timișoara in Romania, to Subotica in Serbia and to Skopje in Macedonia.
