Project Description

Romeo’s Balcony

performance 27th June & 27th September, 2013
installation work curated by Marco Meneguzzo
Juliet’s House Courtyard, Verona

The performance follows in the footsteps of Shakespeare’s drama and revives the passion of Romeo and Juliet by way of a vision influenced by Italian comedy. It has been realized together with the collaboration of the Teatro Stabile di Verona and its director Paolo Valerio. Romeo’s Balcony is an idea that is concretized and becomes a place where we encounter an experience within a dream.
Romeo’s Balcony is a fable that lives on the edges of our world; it is a fantastic monument. This is a work that was formed through the aesthetics of its plans; these recreated an archetype for an architectural tale of love from the past to the present. On Romeo’s Balcony there is paraded a collection of prêt à porter vases of flowers, as though Vivienne Westwood, Alexander Mc Queen, and Jean-Paul Gaultier had worked together to create visual tales about the middle-classes, their vices, and their habits.
Here the cosmic fact of fashion is rounded off by the presence of life: genuine flowers that bring with them the marks of everyday reality. Specifically created for Juliet’s courtyard, the installation unites architecture with humanity’s social needs and allows Shakespeare’s myth to stray into a territory halfway between reality and imagination, in a fantastic dreamlike universe where thoughts, childhood memories, obsessions, real and dreamed-of facts magically mix together. Like an excavation into cinematographic memories, it mixes together the films Romeo e Giulietta; 8 1/2 by Fellini; Network by Sidney Lumet; and Bellissima by Luchino Visconti, to the point of making Romeo the boy next-door in the style of Truffault. Just as with the ephemeral constructions and machines made for celebrations during the Baroque period, realized for commemorating coronations or war victories and bringing the population together to experience and extraordinary event, so Romeo’s Balcony celebrates the Love Event of humanity, and its manifestation transforms the semantic value of the location.


Performers: Daphne Chevalier, Raissa Dubra, Sybil Grand Marnier, Riccardo Maschi, Katia Mirabella Photos: Marianna Bellamoli Cameramen: Elena Girelli, Andrea Piva Video: Studio K, Verona Courtesy: ArtVerona, Musei Civici di Verona, Teatro Stabile di Verona, Studio La Città and the artist

Read More about the “Romeo’s Balcony” Ephemeral Architecture