Scenery and costumes for "Pulcinella" by Stravinsky

Milan

Realized works

Il Pulcinella di Strawinsky's "Pulcinella" and Gluck's "Orfeo". These were Gio Ponti's two principal encounters with the theatre, taking place within the same decade and cantered on La Scala: I have worked at La Scala (see also pp. 122-23) Scenes and costumes: but Ponti would have liked to be the director and not just dress the characters and dress the stage. He had felt this way ever since he had fallen in love with the Russian ballets of Diaghilev at first sight, and then with Apia's theatre. Gio Ponti's architecture was itself almost a theatre, a stage for the moving figures that appeared and disappeared from its staircases, balustrades, balconies, and perspectives. And the clothes that he loved to designwere already costumes. Like the ones for his theatre: costumes that looked as if they were cut out of paper, that one slipped into to make them dance: total costumes, in which the wearer disappeared; the hands vanished always gloved, and so did the hair always under a hat. Simplified costumes, made to be viewed from afar, with nothing material, and still less historical, about them. So were his scenes, which had to look like mere enlargements of rapid sketches. That is to say, they were intended to allude to scenes, not to be them. To simulate the theatre. This is why Ponti wrote on his sketches, do it badly. What he loved about theatrical costume makers was their extraordinary capacity for improvisation. What he feared, and detested, were attempts at theatrical realism. It could be said that his kind of performance was the ballet, and his kind of character was Harlequin, an acrobat of grace and detachment  even if -see his theatre script II Coro- he sometimes lapsed into solemnity.