Welcome to the factory of dreams and beauty

There’s a hidden story inside every one of us that is hard to decipher, especially in this Covid period when deprivation feeds desire. An emotional world can leak out from a photo, overflowing with emotions and dreams yet to be fulfilled.

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And like stardust, we welcome these shots by diving into one mood after another, shutting ourselves off in our secret garden and orchestrating a better fate. A camera lens can capture the colours of hope that animate our gaze in these livid days.

For one day, the Teatro Stabile of Potenza has regained its powers and returned to exercising its role as a hallowed hall, producing shots in the name of glamour to create a magical enchantment and give life to everyone’s dream, representing and personalising it. Transformed into a photo shooting location, it has become the right staging of emotions and new glamorous trends, in a combination of magic and melancholy.

Its walls are struck by the quick and hidden feelings that pierce it, but, even if empty and neglected, it fulfils its function as a dream vault because, we all know it, there is an entire world to discover in an empty theatre. Will these shots be able to knockout the gloomy pandemic through their glamour?

The “Teatro Stabile” of Potenza brings back the glories of the nineteenth century.

A dive into the past of period clothes in the Teatro Stabile of Potenza’s halls to commemorate the 140 years since its inauguration. In a Renaissance setting, shots, poses and gestures managed to bring us back to that whirlwind of emotions of January 26, 1881, when the King of Italy Umberto I, Queen Margherita and Prince Amedeo cut the inaugural ribbon of the city theatre.

The nineteenth century is seen and experienced through a camera lens, a journey through images between its vices and virtues, all told with irony, tenderness, fun and passion. The models, wearing the costumes created by Federica Groia, identified themselves in the magical nineteenth-century atmosphere, giving the images an iconic, contemporary and glamorous side. It feels like retracing those ancient times as an out-of-time observer of the foyer that fills up with spectators for the première. Ladies in sparkling clothes releasing the scent of violets, winking looks and smiles worn with boredom.

The one hundred and fifty members of the orchestra stuck like sardines in the hole under the stage. The breathless trumpet player boringly waiting for the start of the “Traviata”. A loud chattering is heard from the stalls up to the curtain.

They are the ones perched in the gallery that makes a great noise. A long applause suggests that Potenza is greeting the Royals of Italy. It lasts an eternity until absolute silence takes over. The curtain in a minute.

Ultimately, a photography that is moulded into the poetry of the soul, managing to extrapolate sighs, emotions, and looks, immortalising them in portraits that evoke those distant glories and splendours filtered by a modern eye.

Edit by Rosario Angelo Avigliano

Photo: Rosario Claps
Models: Stefania Straziuso – Alessia Picciano – Giuseppe Cavuoti – Eugenio Zaccardo
Dress: Federica Groia Abiti Storici
Staff: Jole Franco – Antonio Fornarino
Translation: Marina Brancaccio