A Conversation on Fortunato Depero’s Marionette Theatre with Dan Hurlin

 

March 26, 2014

Join us for a conversation about the toys and automata that populated the imagination of the Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero, as we explore the genesis of Depero’s 1918 collaboration with the Swiss Egyptologist and writer Gilbert Clavel, I Balli Plastici (Plastic Ballets).

Like other Futurist artists, Depero celebrated technology, speed, and the machine, but in dialogue with Clavel he developed an original formula where the mechanical met the fantastical. Ballet, as the perfect “total work of art,” had a central role during the second half of the 1910s in European avant- gardes. By introducing a ballet with no human dancers, Depero and Clavel anticipated important developments of the following decade.

Award-winning puppeteer Dan Hurlin, currently a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, will be in conversation with CIMA Fellow Raffaele Bedarida and Jessica Palmieri, founder of the blog ItalianFuturism.org and author of an M.A. thesis on Depero’s marionette theatre work.