Alan Alpenfelt Swiss performance and installation artist, theatre director and trainer, community & youth radio empowerer, record producer. 

Siamo quelli giusti




"In every adoption there is an implicit violence, as it involves the existence of human beings stripped from birth of their most basic rights. In order to save them from a future of misery and abandonment, a manipulation of the destinies that had been written for them is, in a way, carried out by tearing them away from their natural roots and culture".
Gabriella Modonesi
Social worker - Ticino Adoption



Theatre
︎2023

Written by
Lalitha del Parente

Directed by
Caterina Filograno

Actors
Ashai Lombardo Arop
Livio Beshir
Luz Beatriz Lattanzi
Federico Lima Roque
Rosanna Sparapano

Set design
Andrea Ceriani

Lights
Davide Onesti

Costumes
Margherita Platé

Sound design
Tommaso Giacopini

Aide to the director
Jonathan Lazzarini

Production
Alan Alpenfelt

Sustained by:
Repubblica e Cantone Ticino - Fondi Swisslos, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Migros Percento Culturale, City of Lugano, City of Chiasso

A talent show.
Aspiring parents.
An extravagant presenter.
A poised western society that seems to be looking to find children for parents instead of parents for children.
A prize up for grabs: Masho, a child from afar.
Siamo Quelli Giusti is an attempt, one of many, to talk about the pieces that make up the experience of international adoption.

Siamo quelli giusti was written by the Swiss author and musician Lalitha Del Parente in 2021 as part of Luminanza - a “reactor” for contemporary Swiss Italian-language playwriting. An extract from it was presented in the form of a reading at the FIT Festival Lugano (CH), and at the Basel Theatre on the occasion of the jubilee of Stück Labor, a programme dedicated to young playwrights and authors.




︎
Future Events

Territori Festival, Bellinzona

11.3.2023
Foce Theatre, Lugano
10.5.2023

︎
Past Events

Theatre of Chiasso
1.3.2023

Author’s notes
"The experience of adoption will accompany me for the rest of my life".
It was this thought that made me look deeper into the subject. Things around us are constantly changing, the way we write, the way we express ourselves, our beliefs can change from one moment to the next. So it is also with every adoptee's relationship with his or her adoptive history. It changes constantly. Ignore, evolve, bury, improve, destroy, reconsider.
The play brings to the stage the attempt to cross the boundary of what is familiar to us towards an unknown future. The text touches on themes such as cultural identity, integration, the sense of belonging to one's family, one's community.
We are the right ones is inspired by all the fellow adoptees, the parents waiting to adopt that I have met, interviewed and shared my personal story with.
I hope that this text will open up the audience to discussion and encourage them to investigate the many documentaries, books, podcasts and artworks made by people who have experienced transracial adoption as knowing different points of view can only help to understand better.

Lalitha del Parente

Before The Revolution Remix




Can language contain the evolution of a society? [...]
Continue reading further down



Online theatre
︎2022

Part of Lingua Madre - a project by Carmelo Rifici and Paola Tripoli winner of:
︎ the Hystrio Prize for Digital Theatre 2021
︎ Premio Ubu 2021

Web adaptation and direction
Alan Alpenfelt

Voices
Monica Piseddu
Valentino Villa

Sound design
Zeno Gabaglio

Web design
Ivan Pedrini
Mike Toebbe
Irene Masdonati

Production
LAC

Presented in Lugano at the 27th edition of the FIT Festival, Before the Revolution by the Egyptian playwright Ahmed El Attar is here re-interpreted by Monica Piseddu and Valentino Villa and remixed by Alan Alpenfelt and Zeno Gabaglio who render it through a sound creation designed for web and SMS interaction.

In its original stage format, El Attar intertwined documentation and fiction relating to pre-revolutionary Egypt and the build-up to the “Arab Spring”. In this new adaptation, the sound creation conceived by Alpenfelt and Gabaglio for Lingua Madre draws on that imagery, with the addition of a reflection on whether it is possible or not to create Art freely.



The audience member is invited to enter the website and has the option whether to give his/her phone number, which will be deleted from the website’s system at the end of the experience. 
An enigmatic video starts and an audio-drama is played, meticulously associated with the ongoing development of the video’s content. During the experience, the phone starts receiving a series of sms’ which tell a parallel story that unfolds into a strikingly reality.
All three narratives lead to one place.

                                                                                 

Enjoy the experience (only in Italian language):
︎ Before the Revolution Remix


Monica Piseddu & Valentino Villa during recording sessions, LAC, Lugano. 

Reading social network comments, with the inherent violence in the nefarious attacks launched from one account to another, the hatred and venom shouted at home or at neighbours, the violence of the superheroes that mass films continue to favour, the rhetoric that conceals (when it does not exploit) anxieties, malaise, distrust, poverty and misery - you would hope not. Yet it is precisely in language that one can read the direction in which the world is evolving.
In
Before The Revolution, language marks a limit, an anthropological and social condition that could no longer continue. And indeed in 2011 Arab society took to the streets in an attempt to find new solutions. But Before The Revolution also traces an impossibility of expression, an impossibility of progress, an inability - for language - to further investigate reality.
Indeed, in the original play, it was the theatrical staging, the stage space, that expressed the unspeakable in all its explosiveness. The challenge of transposing such a vehement duality - that of text and stage, without being able to rely on the physicality of the body - into sound alone seemed immediately daunting. The search for a solution - an authentic one, not a surrogate - meant defining a new alternative with respect to the sound flow of language. A deus ex machina of perception that would be able to instil the question, to suggest the doubt around the sayable. The unpredictable alternation between the platforms of digital fruition seemed to us the most appropriate solution. Leaving the linearity of
Before The Revolution to one vector - even if remixed with an authentically musical taste - and moving to other vectors the making of the project, that all those doubts - those reflections, those fears - have seen to be born and to mature.
- Director’s notes


︎
Past Events

FIT - Festival internazionale del teatro e della scena contemporanea
Lingua Madre
1-10.10.2021
Site

Jackie



︎︎︎ Foto by Masiar Pasquali
We looked as if we would never be subject to decay, there didn’t seem to be an ounce of flesh anywhere. We were somehow meatless, healthy, yes and yet it was our flesh that was always hit the hardest. If it really had been flesh.
Jackie - Elfriede Jelinek




Theatre
2018 ︎

Directed by 
Alan Alpenfelt

Dramaturg
Francesca Garolla

With
Caterina Filograno
Francesca Mazza
Anahi Traversi
Carlotta Viscovo
and the kind participation of the 35° President of the United States of America John “Jack” Fitzgerald Kennedy - Fabrizio Rocchi

Live music
Elena Kakaliagou Ingrid Schmoliner

Video 
Roberto Mucchiut

Scenes
Annelisa Zaccheria

Lights
Fiammetta Baldiserri

Production
LuganoInScena

Jacqueline - Jackie - Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis is the most famous American First Lady in history, an icon of a society that mirrors a media-driven world; a world in which image is worth more than reality. Jackie is the prototype of the “new” woman; the perfect wife, mother and widow, yet imprisoned in her elegant Chanel suit stained with blood and brain matter.
Jackie seems to be unable to break out of her character, becoming the mirror of something that we recognise belogns to us, too. We ourselves are Jackie. We, with our faces painted and our party clothes, our perfect body weight and our family photos. We, who don't know who Jackie really is any more than perhaps we know ourselves. And so it is that Jackie instils in us the doubt that behind the image and pop iconicity there is a raw truth and that true existence lies elsewhere.



"In the light of recent “Me Too” movement, I found the female condition to be an interesting focus for the exploration of the mysterious dialectic between oppressor and oppressed. Without wanting to find either intended victims or potential heroines, I found that female characters offered a further condition in which oppression is perhaps most clearly revealed: they are all too often subjected to control over their freedom, desires, roles, and self expression. The consequences have long-term physiological, bodily, psychic and linguistic effects." Director’s notes


︎
Past events

LAC - Lugano Arte e Cultura
12-13.2.2019
Site

Words and Music



"Sensational immersion into Beckett: a shower of music and sound!" - Corriere della Sera
"Adele Raes, surprising expressive talent" - Migros Azione
"A show of authentic sensitivity that strikes even the subconscious" - Il Sipario
"Spectacular and innovative, it grasps the spirit of Beckett" - ChiassoLetteraria
"I was so shaken I had to put my organs back into place" -
Audience member




Musical theatre
2015 - 2018

︎Selected at the Rencontre du Théâtre Suisse 2016

Written by
Samuel Beckett

Direction
Alan Alpenfelt

With
Adele Raes

Live music NITON (Zeno Gabaglio, Luca Xelius Martegani, El Toxique)

Video
Roberto Mucchiut

In an unspecified future, which could also be the past, a crippled being called Croak keeps Joe (Words) and Bob (Music) prisoners in a tower. Regularly he visits them, demanding they formulate expressions on th emeanings of ancient human concepts, such as Love and Aging. Bob talks through music, Joe through words, both trying to please the despotic Croak and bring him back towards vivid images of beauty and the fullness of life. One night in the tower, Croak sees a face through the candle light. The force of this memory is unbearable, physically overwhelming. It shakes the existence of all three and obliges Croak to retire, leaving Joe and Bob to their tragic fate.
Alan Alpenfelt together with alluring electronic experimental group NITON investigate the visual force of the sound consciousness of Words and Music, committed to the idea that Samuel Beckett’s radio drama is now more than ever of disarming modernity.






Co-produced by
ChiassoLetteraria

Funded by
FSRC - Fondazione svizzera per la radio e la cultura
Repubblica e Cantone Ticino - Fondi SwisslosErnst Göhner Stiftung


︎
Past events

Rencontre du Théâtre Suisse
Genève, CH
27-28.5.2016
Site

LAC - Lugano Arte e Cultura
23.10.2015
Site

ChiassoLetteraria
5-6.5.2015
Site




The Trial for the Donkey’s Shadow





Music Theatre
2017 ︎

Written by
Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Directed by
Alan Alpenfelt

Dramaturg
Simona Gonella

With
Nello Provenzano
Adele Raes
Ulisse Romanò
Massimiliano Zampetti
Adalgisa Vavassori

Live Music
Gabriele Marangoni

Sound
Enrico Mangione

Lights
Andrea Borzatta

Co-production
LAC Lugano

Using binaural sound techniques, performers and noisemakers, Alan Alpenfelt and his team revisit the Swiss author's apocalyptic text, staging a captivating, psychedelic and stimulating performance.

Dürrenmatt re-tells in a tragicomic key the story of the real trial of a donkey's shadow that took place in the ancient - and now destroyed - Greek city of Abdera. The spark that ignites the unstoppable sequence of events starts when a dentist, Strutione, rents a donkey for an urgent operation outside the city but the blazing heat of the plain forces him to sit in the donkey's shadow. An argument ensues between him and the donkey’s owner Anthrax, who accuses him of having paid for the donkey but not for its shadow: the conflict degenerates into a struggle for supreme ideals involving the whole population, political and religious institutions and concluding in an apocalyptic finale.




Funded by
Republic and Canton of Ticino
Fondazione Dürrenmatt-Kerr
Ernst Göhner Stiftung


︎
Past events

Teatro Litta
Milan, I
13.10.2018
Site

Teatro Foce
Lugano, CH
23-24.1.2018
Site

Teatro Foce
Lugano, CH
12-14.1.2017