Federica Rosellini directs her first play at the Piccolo Teatro, with a monologue that she also performs and based on Carne blu, a work that she published in 2021 with a preface by Nadia Terranova and Claudio Longhi and an afterword by Fiona Sansone.
Carne blu is a dark tale, the story of the journey of Orlando, a child born on the Moon with a fish for a heart; Orlando, unlike other children, does not have a normal heart set within his ribcage, but rather a small cloth pocket to the left of his chest, inside which a goldfish named Sunny swims. When Orlando lets his heart swim free, a metamorphosis begins and his body changes, passing through a range of species and genders; he is male and female, bird and insect. Drawing inspiration from Orlando Furioso by Ariosto and the multiform creature of the same name by Virginia Woolf, Federica Rosellini presents a story of the search of that which has been lost but which cannot be forgotten. Co-directed by Fiona Sansone, an expert in didactics and children’s theatre, Carne blu is a play that provides a violent examination of infancy.
Carne blu is a hybrid play, a blend of narrative, theatre and Gothic tale, in which words blend with the illustrations by the author. It has a touch of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, the visionary world of Miyazaki, the coral reefs of the Wertheim sisters, visual artists and mathematicians, of a certain unheimelich that binds the Tower and the automaton from Hoffman’s Sandman to Melusine’s snake tail.

The show features a full nude sequence and a scene with explicit sexual language / The plays of 13, 23 and 30 April are surtitled in English (surtitles curated by Prescott Studio)