"The Drum of Fire "

THE TEXT
The text has been followed step by step in its development, but at the same time only some parts have been used, underlined or superimposed.The division of the play in three acts corresponds to the three movements of the stage score.
In the first movement the dream of Mabima, that in the play emerges at the end of the first act, beats from the beginning the rhythm of the words of each character. The fluxus of words of Kabango, Bagamoio and Lanzirica, beaten through the waving discourse of Mabima, gives the audience pieces of information concerning the antecdents, the status quo and the possible developings of the story.
Thus if the first movement proceeds by micro-segments and temporal superimposing, the second part develops in big blocks respecting the logic of the events: love passion of Lanzirica towards Mabima, Kabango's speech to the people of the forest, Kabango's being bitten by a snake, healing of Lanzirica, Kabango's answer, love night of Kabango and Mabima, snakes' invasion and subsequent flight into the forest.
The third movement is a kind of cantus firmus, an exhausting wait which does not develop, but changes in accordance with the proceedings of the events: betrayal and killing of Mabima, Mabima's confession, efforts to save the Sinrun, death night, death of Kabango.

I availed myself both of the Italian (the manuscript is in French) and the Czech original version of the play. Italian and Czech are both used by Mabima in her speeches.
At the beginning of the second movement the soprano enters wearing the original costume designed by Enrico Prampolini and sings the Song of Mabima, the musical theme composed by Balilla Pratella that Marinetti included in the second act of the play. During the performance the theme is not sung aside (as well as it occurs in the text), but when other characters or Mabima herself are speaking.

THE SCENE
The concert form involves the exclusion of the performing scene. The characters do not act on the stage, they are identified on the scheme of the musicians of an orchestra. This configuration - that results from the disposition of actors and instruments - represents the concert form of the scene.Light is considered as a colour-strength and changes along with voice and sound. Space and climate evoked in the text are conveyed to the audience through light.
From this point of view the scene is therefore constituted not only of actors, musicians and instruments, but also of sounds, voices and light. The scene is no longer the description of a space in terms of places and things, but in terms of movement, rhythm and colour.

THE SCORE
The relationships among the characters are enriched by new meanings through music.
The noise-tuner is not used as an object - neither in its historic form (the noise-tuner of Russolo) nor in one of its contemporary forms - but as sound source to which the percussion give form. In Marinetti's play the noise-tuner introduces a non-imitative sound dimension, which transforms in mechanical noise the sounds of the environment in which the characters are involved. In my interpretation of the play the percussion transform the same sounds in rhythms and timbres always in dialogue with the voices. Marinetti chose the impressionist play to prove what he himself defined "lyric dramatization of the noise". He did not break off with the conventional dramatic structure, did not found a dramaturgy of colour and noise, but wanted to give new life, according to a futurist aesthetics, to the visual, musical and sound elements of the scene. In my opinion Marinetti's work gives the premises for my dramaturgy. He gives us a futurist Sinrun, a project that undertakes, in the form of an impressionist drama, a struggle whose definitive result is postponed.
Marinetti's choices are the basis upon which the dramaturgical and musical structure of the project is founded. Struggle included. Not as never-changing statements, but as sources of an in fieri project.