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Robert Wilson stages Peter Pan as a musical tale for adults, where humor is mixed with fear. He adapts Erich Kästner’s version of James Barrie’s story, where Peter Pan appears more like a David Bowie type than like a chubby little boy. Featuring original songs and music by the Brooklyn-and-Paris-based «freak folk» band CocoRosie, this production has been playing successfully in the Berliner Ensemble’s repertoire, as well as on several international tours.

Spoleto, Teatro Nuovo
4, 5, 6 July 2014
Italian surtitles from the English and German original

Workshop

SURTITLING – THE SPIRIT AND THE LETTER / L’ESPRIT ET LA LETTRE
February 2014

Paris, Théâtre de l’Odéon, February 3rd, 2014
A workshop coordinated by Laurent Muhleisen and Michel Bataillon
Maison Antoine Vitez, Centre International de la Traduction Théâtrale, Paris
With the participation of Mauro Conti, Prescott Studio, Florence

«Within European culture» – writes Laurent Muhleisen in his introduction to this French initiative – «translation holds a central role; without such a mediation, disseminating works of literature would not be possible. In the theatre productions circulating across our continent, the art of translation stands out in the surtitles practice. Without this support, the reception of a performance in a foreign language is hopelessly incomplete».

«How are surtitles conceived and designed? What ‹actors› are at work on them? What skills, what steps and strategies does their achievement imply? What artistic, technical and logistical resources should be set into motion, so that everyone in the European audience be enabled to fully experience at their best the spirit and the letter of a text while attending a performance in a foreign language? To these questions the workshop [of February 3, 2014] attempts to provide an answer».

> Mauro Conti – Scripta Volant (2014)

After a rewriting project lasting four years, the Quantum Theatre Group of Teheran presents in Milan its Hamlet in the adaptation by Shahram Ahmadzadeh. Arash Dadgar, director and founder of the company, pushes himself to the limits in an attempt to answer the many unresolved questions of the play. Adapting the classics – theatre, stories, novels – for the stage with a contemporary eye which also takes into account modern theories of physics (the reference to quantum physics is evident in the very name of the company) is the inspiration for the Quantum Theatre Group, a company from founded in 2009 which finds in Shakespeare a privileged interlocutor. «Shakespeare is for me the universal compendium on the contradictions of human nature», explains Arash Dadgar, director and founder of the company, born in 1973; «he is my contemporary Iranian playwright».

Milan, Teatro Studio
30 September, 1, 2, 3, 4 October 2014
Italian surtitles from a Farsi translation

Shooting and pictures: Milan, Teatro Strehler, March 28th 2013, Backstage of Simon Armitage’s «Odyssey», after Homer, staged by Piccolo Teatro di Milano, Theatre of Europe, together with Greece National Theatre, Athens. Project, direction, set and light design Robert Wilson. Italian surtitling, from Greek, Prescott Studio.

«Translating Voices Across Continents» (TVAC) is both an educational project and a professional workshop that will result in the creation of English surtitles for Italian and international theater productions. On the one hand, the project gives American university students the opportunity to familiarize themselves with specific aspects of this multimedia translation sector, engaging them in the creative process of this work. On the other hand, it is a valuable service that will increase language access to the Piccolo Teatro di Milano’s productions for a wider audience. These productions are part of the Piccolo Teatro’s ad hoc calendar for an international audience on the occasion of Expo 2015 (Milan, May-October).

Stemming from a proposal by the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, the project is developed by Prescott Studio, a reference point in Europe for theatrical titling, and by Montclair State University (NJ, USA), that, by means of the Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies, fosters and supports interdisciplinary approaches, a cosmopolitan academic vision, and a focus on the highest expressions of Italian culture. Prescott Studio, as supervisor, will offer the professional expertise, sensibility, and organizational experience needed, while the Inserra Chair and the professors in the Italian BA program at MSU, through their own interns, will oversee the adaptations of the surtitles into English.

Les dialogue des Carmélites is one of those titles that have made twentieth-century opera great. Composed by Francis Poulenc in 1957 for the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the opera is drawn from a Georges Bernanos text by the same title (1949). Listening to it means to lighten the impact of many clichés.

Bari, Teatro Petruzzelli
30 January, 1, 3, 5 February 2015
Italian surtitles from the French original

A Testimony by Robert Carsen (2013)

Mario Martone, Enzo Moscato and Mario Tronco, director of the Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, join forces for a project inspired by Mérimée’s masterpiece: to create an unparalleled Carmen, with Iaia Forte in the lead role, and with Roberto De Francesco at her side – a show which touches on contemporary themes in a synthesis of tradition and cultures both ancient and new.

Milan, Teatro Strehler
8 – 17 May, 2015
English surtitling by Prescott Studio and Montclair State University, NJ, USA, as part of the project

Translating Voices Across Continents.

> The Art of Compromise
> TVAC – Inserra Chair / Montclair State University
> Donatella Codonesu – La Voce di New York, march 21, 2015

Video by Isabella Babbucci and Prescott Studio
Texts after the participation by Mauro Conti at the international workshop
«Reading Foreign Voices», Decembert 5th, 2014
Montclair State University, NJ, USA, Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies,
College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Euripides’ The Bacchae, read anew and presented by two modern poets. The play concerns the dramatic conflict between eros and repression, and the victory of the vindictive god, Dionysus, over his enemy and persecutor, the young monotheistic King Pentheus of Thebes. The music for this drama is in the form of a four movement symphony. The action takes place in the courtyard of the royal palace in Thebes, and on Mount Cytheron.
Hans Werner Henze

Rome, Teatro Costanzi
November 27, 29, December 1, 3, 5, 10, 2014
In the original language, with Italian and English surtitles by Prescott Studio

The Bassarids, which today I understand to a far greater degree and hold much dearer than when I was composing the work – a hectic and extraordinarily brief period of less than a year, in a form of protest lacking sufficient theoretical basis and in a state of utter loneliness – today I consider this to be my most important music theatre work. It is interesting and modern and still relevant for us and specifically addresses questions associated with the years around 1968: what is freedom and what is bondage? What is repression, what is revolt and what is revolution? This is all in fact displayed, insinuated and suggested by Euripides. The multiplicity and richness of relationships, the tangible sensual relationships between the ancient civilisation of this Archaic period and our time is created in Auden’s text; Euripides is transposed into our time in a manner which could not have been better achieved with the best possible stage production of the original Greek play: through the constant manifestation of the distance to a different civilisation from a time long past.
Hans Werner Henze

Philosophical tale, surreal Bildungsroman, scathing social satire: the ingredients of the best seller of Voltaire (published in 1759 in response to the optimistic doctrines of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, according to whom whatever happens we are still living in the «best of all possible worlds» and immediately put to the Index by the Catholic Church), could not be indifferent to the genial personality of Leonard Bernstein. Two centuries later, on October 29, 1956, at the Colonial Theater of Boston is staged for the first time the operetta Candide. Picaresque adventures around the globe, tragic deaths and unexplained resurrections, narrated with all the flamboyant echoes of Broadway musicals, from the overwhelming score of one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century.

Florence, Opera di Firenze
78° Maggio Musicale Fiorentino 2015
23, 29, 31 May, 3 June, 2015
Italian and English surtitles by Prescott Studio