A truly special “Turandot” is on calendar for the new 2019-2020 opera season: the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, with its superintendent Carlo Fuortes, entrusted one of the most loved operas to Chinese contemporary art star Ai Weiwei, who will direct and design scenes and costumes, re-reading China imagined by two Europeans, the playwright Gaspare Gozzi in 1700 and the composer Giacomo Puccini at the dawn of the 20th century.
A name internationally renowned since 2012, Ai Weiwei is a painter and sculptor, but also a designer, an architect, a photographer and above all a dissident intellectual, openly critical of the Beijing government. A modern “Renaissance man”, he makes use of a wide range of expressive forms with surprising ease. Objects and artifacts thus turn into metaphors of human anxieties and contemporary crises, playing an important role in the creation of a culture of civil and human rights.
Ai Weiwei’s Turandot also will be an opera immersed in the contemporary world, referring to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. Ai Weiwei told the newspapers that he had decided to experiment with a new artistic genre because of his special bond with this opera: as a penniless artist, he worked as an extra in a Turandot directed by Franco Zeffirelli at the Metropolitan in New York.
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