Armande sono io! @Primavera dei Teatri - Castrovillari

Sunday, May 31
@ Primavera dei Teatri, Teatro San Girolamo – Castrovillari

Armande sono io!

Armande sono io! is the first creation in a diptych that Ateliersi dedicates to Carla Lonzi, to be followed in 2026 by Taci, anzi parla. Through these two works, the company composes an autobiography of those years in which the personal truly became political: the life of a single woman — made of dreams, poems, and merciless reflections on her relationships — resonates with the lives of many others and becomes a mirror of an entire society unfolding around her.

Armande sono io! begins from Carla Lonzi’s final research on the movement of the Précieuses, which developed in France in the mid-17th century. The book of the same title, published ten years after her death in 1992 in Milan by Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, gathers three texts in which the author identifies the experience of the Précieuses as a central reference point for the women’s movement, together with the transcription of a long dialogue with Anna Piva from 1981 and notes from the notebooks she filled while working in libraries in close contact with primary sources. Although unfinished, the book is now considered the concluding work of Lonzi’s thought, a further chapter in the construction of feminist theory.

Convinced that theatre reflects real situations, the author seeks within the scenic experience that quality of relationships she also recognizes in life itself: the affirmation of one’s own eroticism, consciousness-raising, and self-legitimization of judgment, whenever “certain privileges are no longer granted to men.” Initially, she searched within the plots of classical tragedy, but it was through reading Molière’s Les Précieuses ridicules and Les Femmes Savantes that she found the condition she was investigating represented on stage. Lonzi writes: “They made me think of consciousness-raising; a multitude of coincidences astonished me. I recognize many aspects and traits as my own, and I think about the meaning of the group as the bearer of a new culture shaped by women’s contribution.”

By: Carla Lonzi
Concept and direction: Fiorenza Menni
Dramaturgy: Sara De Simone, Caterina Venturini, Fiorenza Menni
Historical consultancy: Lorenza Moretti
With: Fiorenza Menni and Luce Sant’Ambrogio
Music creation: Vincenzo Scorza
Voice of Armande: Sarah Saidi
Armande costume design: Umberta Burroni

A production by Ateliersi
Co-produced with Festival dell’Eccellenza al Femminile
In collaboration with Festival della Violenza Illustrata
With the support of the Ministero della Cultura, Regione Emilia-Romagna, and Comune di Bologna