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
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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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