When a stage space is available
Two voices/performers and guitar. Singing, spoken passages, movement, objects and lighting create a complete theatrical dramaturgy.
Performance duration: approx. 50 minutes.
Schools and workshops
Miniature
at school
The performance comes to school as an artistic experience. The workshop, when included, comes afterwards: a way to keep looking, imagining and giving things a voice.
Clouds, stones, puddles, shadows, branches and other elements of everyday life tell their own stories in the first person. Music and words open up a shared space in which children and adults can encounter the same images without having to take the same thing from them.
The experience
Performance first
Miniature does not use its songs as exercises: first and foremost, it asks us to listen, observe and imagine.
In the project, everyday things begin to speak and tell of transformations, relationships, traces, separations and returns. The audience is invited to dwell on what normally remains in the background and to complete, through imagination, what music, words and the stage suggest.
In a school context, the performance can be followed by time with the artists or by a workshop. The two parts remain distinct: the value of the experience does not depend on a subsequent educational assignment.
Where it comes from
A project also shaped by long-term work with children and classes
Arnolfo Borsacchi has worked for many years as a music educator with children and classes and, alongside the songs of Miniature, has written numerous other original songs for children. This repertoire is separate from the performance, but belongs to the same musical and creative ground from which the project developed.
Some of these songs have been translated or adapted into other languages for music-education and training activities with children and adults abroad. Alongside composition, his poetic practice has also continued in the two books of poetry games Animali in versi and Città del mondo in versi.
Activities following the performance are therefore not a teaching apparatus added afterwards: they grow from sustained work with music, words, imagination and classes, while the artistic experience of Miniature remains distinct and self-contained.
Two formats, different spaces
The format is chosen together with the school according to the available space, the number of participants and the kind of experience to be created.
When a more intimate format is needed
Voice and guitar. Words and songs remain at the centre, without stage objects or an elaborate theatrical dramaturgy.
Also suitable for more basic spaces, with the technical configuration agreed in advance.
After the performance
Three modular possibilities. They can remain simple moments of dialogue or develop into a more articulated creative process.
Meet the artists
Questions, curiosities and observations can become the simplest way to extend the experience of the performance and revisit its images, music and actions.
Give a thing a voice
Choose an object, a natural element or a phenomenon and try to imagine its point of view: what does it see, what does it remember, what does it want, what changes over the course of its existence?
From text to song
The work can continue towards shaping a short poetic text and, when the context makes it possible, towards writing a new song to sit, imaginatively, alongside the characters of Miniature.
What it sets in motion
A way of looking that continues
Attention. Noticing what habit makes less visible.
Imagination. Expanding the real without having to replace it with something extraordinary.
Relationship. Discovering that a stone, a puddle, a branch or a footprint can become gateways to speaking about encounters, distance, care and memory.
Time and transformation. Being born, changing, disappearing, leaving traces, returning in another form: deeper themes emerge through play and images, without being explained in advance.
Organisation
We shape the format together
Miniature can meet children and young people of different ages. Each proposal is shaped in relation to the age of the classes, the space and the purpose of the encounter: from primary through lower and upper secondary school, the performance and any follow-up activities can bring different aspects of the relationship between poetry, music, imagination and ways of looking at the world to the fore.
Time can be set aside before or after the performance to meet the artists. Technical requirements and any workshop are agreed with the school in advance.
Schools
Let’s imagine the encounter
To explore the duo or trio, number of performances, an encounter with the artists or a workshop, write to us with the age range of the classes, approximate number of participants and available space.