Francesco Origo

Actor, director and acting teacher. He graduated from the acting school of the Teatro Stabile di Genova in 1979. As an actor he has performed in Italy, Russia, Mexico (Festiva Cervantino), Netherlands (Holland Festival), Belgium, France (Festival d’Avignon). Origo has directed more than thirty plays and taught acting at Teatro Stabile in Genoa for ten years. Furthermore, he has held specialization courses for professional actors in Italy and Russia.

Since 2001 Origo serves as the artistic director of Teatridimare. Over the last 17 years, the actors-sailors of Compagnia çàjka have sailed more than 25,000 miles, bringing their performances to the ports of Italy (Sardinia, Tuscany, Lazio, Liguria, Calabria), France (Corsica), and Norway. Teatridimare does not limit itself merely to sea tours, but also collaborates with local institutions and populations. As a theatrical project that is constantly on the ‘road’, Teatridimare is premised on the idea of shared creativity, combining diverse theatrical codes and exchanging techniques during rehearsals and throughout various workshops; the latter are designed for professionals, but are also open to the general public (adults and children), aiming at weaving together different techniques and dynamics.

WORKSHOP

Aristophanes and Democracy 

Cycle B: 18 July – 1 August

From Thomas Moore to Tommaso Campanella, the idea of the ideal city has traversed the ages. Revisiting Aristophanes’ The Birds is an attempt to come in contact with this dream yet again, especially at a time when the concept of democracy clashes with individual ethics, and the Polis as a microcosm of harmony and justice is in crisis.
It is in the ideal world of the birds, far away from human problems and free from the arrogant laws of the gods, that Aristophanes plunges his two protagonists. The two characters escape from a city full of conflict and chaos, searching for a new Polis.
A number of characters follow these two clowns; human or divinely anthropomorphic, these characters represent a parasitic world, a variegated Vaudeville carousel.
The Birds therefore proposes itself as a workbench for an extremely wide creative research, encompassing a number of things from the exercises on the Choir – with the possibility of transforming the Coryphaeus into Chorus and vice versa – to the study and invention of the different human and divine characters.
The modes of the comic theatre will be examined; all those modalities that since Aristophanes, and through Menander, Plautus and Terence, in Latinity have led to the Commedia dell ‘Arte: the study of comic timing, the structuring of gags, the micro-dramaturgical relationship between the characters. In addition to the training exercises of the working group, the workshop provides ‘plastic’ studies and physiognomics, exercises on the chorus, study of the main and secondary characters, and practical work on some of the play’s scenes.

Jointly taught with Enrico Bonavera