The Shore of Seduction. Interview with Sláva Daubnerová in the Stage Area

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When the storyboard of the new production of “Traviata” by Sláva Daubnerová , scheduled at Caracalla from July 19 with Francesco Lanzillotta on the podium, as part of the rich program developed by Damiano Michieletto, lands in my email, I am a little afraid to open it because I fear I will find a bed, like in Mario Martone's production for the Rome Opera in 2021 with the Putin-style bed on which the male guests, obviously cis, threw their cloaks and sticks.

Such a crude, disrespectful symbolism of the taking possession of the female body by the paying man had irritated me beyond measure and, considering that the avant-garde Slovakian performer, who has been directing for four years, has a reputation for not skimping on signs and images, I had the idea that I would be very irritated a second time. For goodness sake, it's not that Giuseppe Verdi had been subtle with his character: "A whore must always be a whore", he had written in 1854 to the music-loving sculptor Vincenzo Luccardi, with whom he maintained a dense correspondence, complaining about a Roman staging of the opera on which the censorship had been smothering and soothing to the point of having made "a pure and innocent Traviata" and therefore "incomprehensible" and "many thanks! Because in this way they have ruined all the positions and all the characters" .

Verdi, however, also had some tender feelings towards his mischievous kept woman, who has those accents of love “carved into her heart”, while cloaks, canes and, damn it, top hats, definitely not: they recall A Clockwork Orange, droogs, rapes. : In short, things that poor Alphonsine Plessis, the original model of the story, transposed by Alexandre Dumas fils who was in love with her in the famous novel “The Lady of the Camellias” and then by Francesco Maria Piave and Verdi in the opera that delivered her to immortality, obviously did not ignore, having been sold by her father to an old man at thirteen and then forced into prostitution, but that nonetheless, thanks to her beauty and intelligence, she had managed to distance herself from her own horizons by rising to fame and money first as a kept woman, one of the first “great horizontals” in the history of France and, then, as the wife of Count Edouard de Pérregaux, who had assisted her even on her deathbed, in 1947, at only twenty-three years old, during the days of the carnival that are evoked in the first lines of the third act of the opera and also in the original text because nothing “does” more pathetic, that is, nothing is more popular, than dying so young in the days when everyone gives themselves over to mad joy. Alphonsine, who became Marie in life, Marguerite in Dumas's text, Violetta in Verdi's, dies of tuberculosis, the disease of the century both for the number of victims and because it was indicated as a cultural and social factor: the nineteenth-century imagination associated it, in men, with creative genius, while it was believed that in women it was a sign of an amoral lifestyle, lived without restraint and without savings. Alphonsine-Marie the whore could therefore only die of consumption. And it is precisely from this, from the destruction of the body and "the social stigma that derives from it" , as she tells me on the phone on a very hot day at the end of June, during a break in production, that Daubnerovà started to tell the story of "her" Violetta: " The body and the illness of the protagonist are the center of the staging . Violetta's destroyed body is a metaphor for her psyche, devastated by childhood sexual abuse and the subsequent years of prostitution, which became for her a means of instinctive survival". I finally peek at the tableau of references and find Helmut Newton, the corsets of Thierry Mugler "great inventor of powerful and assertive female worlds", as well as an excellent costume designer as everyone remembers, historical photos of tuberculosis patients and also mental patients in one of those Salpetrière-style hospital beds, Frida Kahlo, wounded in body and soul, and above all Camille Claudel, another woman devoted to martyrdom for love, with her "Femme accroupie", crouched, folded in on herself, her spine in evidence, her sex open, which is also one of the models of the staging (Caracalla is notoriously very suitable for grandiose sets) . Here and there, in the conversation - Daubnerovà has informed herself and a lot, as women usually do - Susan Sontag appears in her essay “Illness as metaphor”, published in 1978 , which pointed out how, in the bourgeois and corrupt 19th century, it was thought that tuberculosis produced “spells of euphoria”, in addition to “increased appetite” and, it goes without saying, “exacerbated sexual desire” and that this was what Piave, Verdi and Dumas imagined: “If I were cured, I would die, my dear”, the writer has Marguerite say to Armand: “What sustains me is the feverish life I lead”, and which is the perfect counterpart to Violetta’s “I must always be free” and her premise in the exchange with Flora “I entrust myself to pleasure and I am wont/to soothe my ills with this medicine”. To let loose with life, knowing that death is in your breath. Daubnerovà says she wanted to tell the story from her point of view: the loneliness, the suffering for the social stigma caused by her illness and her past as a prostitute, “with many surreal moments”, referable to a pre-death delirium .

“Even the romantic and erotic relationship with Alfredo is nothing more than a last attempt to escape death, a basic instinct that links eros and thanatos”. A fallen woman, but also a successful woman, Violetta, for whom the director looked to the fashion of the early Nineties (“style is always a great source of social reading”) and, at the same time, to important figures in history and literature such as Veronica Franco. Who, however, I observe, was anything but a defeated woman: she even managed to be acquitted from a witchcraft trial. Certainly by bribing and blackmailing, but in short without ending up on the stake, which was a bit of a sealed fate once you ended up in the hands of the Inquisition. “True”, she replies: “But I was interested in her intellectual side, the studies she dedicates herself to, like Marie, to lift herself from her condition. I always start with women”. She did it with Manon, conceived as a social drama for the National Theatre in Prague a few months ago, for “The Cunning Little Vixen” by Janáček, transformed into a dark tale of exploitation and human devastation for the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava, for Leonora in “La Forza del destino”, a woman forced into war. Women in opera always die, as that fabulous show that is “The seven deaths of Maria Callas” by Marina Abramovic, another reference for this project, reminds us: “It happens because they don’t want to resign themselves to their fate, because they rebel” . The costumes for Traviata are by Kateřina Hubená, and they are indeed strong, willful, a sign of this era as well as that of Newton: the bed, in practice, does not exist because Violetta, if the premises become an actual staging, will go and die elsewhere. In herself.

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