Il grande bianco. Trascendenza della Grande Guerra is a dramatic meditation on the Great War.
It is an opera for alpine choir, instrumental ensemble and live electronics created for the Teatro Valli in Reggio Emilia during the Festival Aperto.
A hundred years after the tragedy this show is more involving than ever: you can physically move between trenches, smoke and reconstructions arranged for the performance.
There are many similarities between 1914 and 2014, because the Great War is the real moment in which our recent history begins.

The Teatro Valli in Reggio Emilia has been completely redesigned to play host to Il grande bianco.
The theater is transformed into a huge perceptual device: a sensory machine that hosts the public in a way never seen before. Il grande bianco is a work that uses all the spaces of the theatre, not just the stage. The public does not attend frontally but is inside the show, it is part of it” says the author Roberto Paci Dalò.
The spectators, divided into two large groups, are led along the scenic path “between music, objects, smoke and smells, to let them live the experience of the trench.
We go back in time. The mimesis of the public is absolute and unconditional.

È flusso di nebbie di ghiacciai, disorientamento di vapori freddi e crepitii surreali, il defluire bianconero di immagini di Fronti, l’opera video di Roberto Paci Dalò (Rimini, 1962).

Diana Gianquitto Artribune September 30, 2016

Dilations, silences, suspensions

Paci Dalò starts from what he has identified as one of the key elements of the whole conflict: the feeling of collective expectation.
All rhetoric is annulled and therefore penetrates into a place with a rarefied atmosphere. The state of mind that he want to inspire in the viewer is in fact that of “immobility of the night in a silent place”, as the author says.
A trench war is made of bloody clashes but at the same time of dilations, silences, suspensions. A conflict, that of the First World War, that caught the world by surprise, provoking unexpected reactions. Think of large-scale social phenomena such as mass desertions, which until then have been sporadic and isolated manifestations of opposition.
Moreover, the main place where the collective memory of the Great War in Italy remains is represented by the Alps. It is these impervious mountains that preserve the memory of that drama, as well as the alpine songs, in which the mythological reminiscence of the First World War is kept.
These are the starting points of the work of Roberto Paci Dalò, who adds: “Let’s imagine the encounter between an alpine choir and Morton Feldman. The result would be a work with the most significant silences of the same sounds. And isn’t this, after all, the same peculiarity as the echo of the mountain?”

The songs of the Alpine tradition

During the tour, the spectators meet the musicians of the Ensemble del Peri and the voices of the Coro La Baita di Scandiano, who “although located in different corners, they produce an overall melody”.
The musical materials of reference are in fact the songs of the Alpine tradition – in particular those linked to the epic of the Great War – which are transfigured and recomposed in a contemporary project with surprisingly new characteristics.
The result of the decomposition is a transcendental musical work that suggests “suspended spaces of clear nights where even the smallest sounds take place in a place that is small and enormous at the same time: where vastness is perceived through detail”, says the author.
Paci Dalò has literally “disassembled and reassembled these alpine songs to create environmental sounds or sound landscapes”.
He plays an active part in the show. He is on stage performing on the bass clarinet.