DANSE MACABRE
Concept:
By re-creating the famous medieval Danse Macabre using the personalities that are related with the Corvin Castle (Charles I of Hungary, Voyk, Sigismund, king of Hungary, John Hunyadi, Elisabeta Szilagy, Mattia, Carol Robert De Anjou, Emericus Thokoly, Gabriel Bethlen, Appafy Michael, Vlad the Impaler, knights prisoners, hostagees, labourers) we bring into the present the most important concept that defined the medieval period: the apparent class distinction is completely neutralized by Death as the ultimate equalizer.
In the Corvin Castle is inevitable to avoid the theme/subject of Death: each character has its own story regarding his mortality or bringing the final sentence to the other: tortured or sentenced to death, killed or left to die, each part of the medieval castle has a legend to tell.
Finally, the spirtits of the Corvin Castle are finding their release by dancing together. There is no other superior to the other; they are all unified in death through a final dance.
The final work will consist of an application which runs online and also offline providing information about the medieval Dance of Death, the medieval music instruments, music and dances and could be useful also for the tourists who are visiting the castle or the Medieval festival held at location.
The finished version of the proposed video work will be of course integrated in the application.
transcinemaexpress.ro/DigitalArtStorytellingDARTS/
“Who was the fool, who the wise [man],
who the beggar or the Emperor?
Whether rich or poor,
[all are] equal in death.”
Dance of Death, also called Danse Macabre (from the French language), is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one’s station in life, the Dance of Death unites all.
The Danse Macabre consists of the dead or personified Death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and labourer.
Animated human skeletons have been used as a personification of death in Western culture since the Middle Ages. The dance-with-death allegory was originally a didactic dialogue poem to remind people of the inevitability of death and to advise them strongly to be prepared at all times for death (see memento mori and Ars moriendi).
Short verse dialogues between Death and each of its victims, which could have been performed as plays.
A danse macabre painting may show a round dance headed by Death or a chain of alternating dead and live dancers.
From the highest ranks of the mediaeval hierarchy (usually pope and emperor) descending to its lowest (beggar, peasant, and child), each mortal’s hand is taken by a skeleton or an extremely decayed body.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
As Wagner, Virginia Woolf, Boccaccio, Escher and many other felt inspired by the magical setting of the Villa Rufolo, I was driven too by the place that I was lucky to discover through my online research: art and nature in one place, it became my desire to visit it and experience the contemporary life there.
My projects consist in creating floral and vegetal patterns and also apply them on 3D portraits of the characters related with the villa to express the magic atmosphere and creative force of the historic complex. At the Torre D’ingresso, the entrance of the villa “there are 4 sculptures: each corner stands a statue of a human representing the four seasons- spring, summer, autumn, winter”.
The regenerative force of the nature creates year by year this floral mandala, this fractal that connects the past with present: when Wagner was inspired by the gardens of the Villa Rufolo and declared that he had found in real life “the enchanted garden of Klingsor”, a setting he had imagined for his opera Parsifal, he established a cultural tradition that we meet at the villa today: a living phenomenon of a rich cultural life with many art exhibitions and music concerts.
The “the garden of the soul” is a place for us to feel inspired and express this beauty.
DOME PROJECTION AT THE ROMAN TEMPLE OF MINERVA
The English Park
The English park was the final phase of the age-old castle architecture of the Teutonic Order in Alden Biesen. Grand Commander Franz von Reischach (1784-1807) commissioned to design this landscape park in 1786-1787. It contained all the elements of an idyllic and romantic park: slopes, woodland, monumental trees, lawn, winding paths, water and islands and a number of architectural constructions such as the Roman temple of Minerva, Tartarian houses, a Chinese temple, a cave, a ruin and a hermitage.
From the English park you have a view of the moated castle and the back of the southern fore-castle. This park dates from 1785-1786. The lawn is like a stepping stone from the moated castle to the countryside. In the distance you can see, against the now mature woodland, the round temple of Minerva, made from marlstone, which is one of the follies of this landscaped park.