Giorgio Strelher at La Scala - The Space - Museo Teatrale alla Scala

In his interpretation of stage space, Giorgio Strehler does not start from an architectural conception. His method is to gather sensations, suggestions, memories, then elaborated, interwoven and branched. It is the set designers with whom he collaborates who structure the space with him and for him.

In his first creative phase, Strehler turns to the great painters of the 20th century: Luigi Veronesi, Renato Guttuso, Felice Casorati, Fabrizio Clerici, Leonor Fini, Alberto Savinio. But there remains in him a meandering impatience with the pictorial space, which will never be his own.

He then turns to Giulio Coltellacci, the Roman set designer increasingly captured by the world of the musical revue, with Garinei and Giovannini; then it's the turn of Piero Zuffi, a brilliant artist but with a tendency to megalomania; and again to Visconti's set designer, Mario Chiari, by now moved on to cinema. They are all paths to get closer to himself: Strehler will become Strehler through three great alter egos, Gianni Ratto, Luciano Damiani, Ezio Frigerio.

Ratto is pragmatic: he intervenes directly in restructuring the main stage of Piccolo Teatro (1947) and remains alongisde Strehler steadily until 1953: the next year he sails to Brasil. Imaginative and eccentric, he leaves the memory of spaces that change on sight, vertical scenes and heterogeneous prop materials, refined colors and architectural forms with streamlined and lively grace.

The great stage revolution takes place with Damiani. He does not possess the creative speed of Gianni Ratto, he is a meditative, spending nights pondering new stage formulas that are increasingly essential in form and color. White will dominate the scene, extending beyond the stage and pervading the spectator's space by incorporating it. An example is the platform that invades the stalls in Goldoni's "Baruffe chiozzotte" (1964), or the veil suspended over Čechov's "The Cherry Orchard" (1974). Strehler's theater acquires with Damiani a new structural awareness and a marked visual identity.

Damiani's ascetic spirituality is balanced with Ezio Frigerio's concrete materiality. Frigerio imbues the theater with the poetic realism that Damiani tends instead to dry in elegant geometry. He brings with him stone, brick, glass, plastic; and he takes the perspective of the classical scenic tradition. In his scenic space, reality returns as a protagonist, not to be described, but to be dreamed by memory and nostalgia. In such sublimation there is often a vein of melancholy. Damiani and Frigerio: two antithetical identities that alternate over the years: because they are part of Strehler's soul and the spirit of his theater.